Shellaccident!!!

What do you call it when you spill half a bottle of red enamel Shellac all over the press and the floor?

A SHELLACCIDENT!!!




Spiders

Okay, so I decided I'd better not leave you hanging. (That's a little spider pun for you.)

I talked to my mom Monday night for the first time in a month. I told her about my spider woes and she insisted that I tell my landlord about my little problem. Of course, this is the same thing that Carrie has been insisting since I moved in... but when it comes from your Mom, it's different somehow. Also, my Mom lives in the middle of the woods and leaves the doors open all of the time and hardly ever has spiders. Apparently, my situation is not as normal as I'd tried to convince myself.

Anyway... I emailed my landlord and he wrote me back saying that he would have a professional pest control person come out and spray for me. I guess we'll see how effective that is. I'll get back with you on that.

Baseball

The Cardinals are sucking my will to live.
I'm trying not to pin my every happiness on baseball.
But when all I do is print and watch baseball, it's kind of hard not to.

Tamarind

Things have been odd lately in the studio. I'm not quite sure if it's the project or the timeline or just the fact that people are starting to wear down a bit. I don't know how to describe it. We had a pretty good groove going and now it's just off a little bit. Maybe it's just me.

We're still keeping busy for the most part. I think part of the problem is that these tusche washes have to sit for quite a while to dry before you can do anything to them. So if you don't time things right, you can end up spending a couple of hours sitting around doing nothing. Once again... maybe it's just me.

We have now moved onto the Solvent Tusche Washes. You can use any number of solvents to reconstitute the solvent-based tusches. Normally, Rodney has the class do three tests with one type of tusche and three different types of solvents. However, our water-based projects were so crappy that he offered us the opportunity to try our favorite wash again. So our projects are turning out to be two solvent tests and a repeat of one water-based test. You can get an idea of the layout here. This is my stone with the water-based tusche applied on the bottom row.



Here is Patrick putting a gum arabic mask on his plate. The areas where the gum is applied will be resistant to the solvent washes (but not the water-based tusche washes).




The solvent washes were a lot trickier than the water based ones. I don't think they look as nice but maybe that's just because I don't know how to do it very well. Here's Alexandra applying one of her solvent tusches to her plate.



Just in case you haven't gotten enough, check out Yuli and Celina working on their stones.



I finished applying the tusches to my plate and stone yesterday and started etching them today. I was able to get both the first etch on my plate and my stone during class. I also was able to get a little bit of work done on a print for a portfolio I'm in, which was good. I left Tamarind around 4pm and went home to watch the baseball game (see above). Around 8pm, I ran to the grocery store with Celina and was back by 8:30pm to work at Tamarind some more. I had the whole place to myself and ended up staying until after midnight. Besides putting the second etch on my stone and plate, I also worked on cleaning the studio up a little bit. I've been going a little crazy from all the clutter and mess in the studio.

Cleaning a million of these made me feel a little bit better: