Tandy Leather Visit

We recently moved back to Seattle. On one of my move-in errands, I noticed a Tandy Leather Factory store, and had to drop in. A number of years ago, all the stores had closed down, but they are now back in business. I chatted a bit with the manager, and we talked about the trade for a bit. I inherited my grandfather's leather tools, and there is a bit of nostalgia going into these stores.

I'm going to need some sort of soft leather hide (or maybe really strong oiled paper??) if I want to make bellows for any tooling forge. According to the manger, Modern leather is prepared using modern chemicals, most of which were probably not available in 4004 BC. But they did have a book on brain tanning, entitled Deerskins Into Buckskins.

I picked up a copy since I was there (I'll have to start reading it soon). It looks like it got a great review on Amazon!

Looks like I'm getting closer to having to kill an animal for this project. I'm not really looking forward to it, but if I used every bit of the animal, then it would be less of a waste. Hide for bellows, hip joint for mortar & pestle, hair for brushes...

Maybe if I make the bow & arrows, and have my Dad shoot a deer, as he can get tags...

3 hours to the new year

It's nine PM on the west coast, and we move back to the states tomorrow. I'm up in the hotel with a bit of a headache, waiting for the move to be over. Today I let in the cleaning crew into our old house, watched the Price is Right with Drew Carey & Beyond Planet of the Apes, came back & steam cleaned our old house's carpet, dropped off the cleaner, hit the driving range with my friends, got dinner at Boston Pizza, and waited for my daughter to go to sleep. I'll probably get to bed before midnight too.

What does this have to do with the art project? Not much, but the good news is once I'm back in my old house in the states, it will be easier to do things like make a kiln from scratch, fire pit, etc.

Happy new year!

Vinegar + Copper = different types of Green!

I haven't added to this blog for waaay too long! The reason? I was laid off in late October, and was looking for a job for a little while. It was hard to justify playing with copper, bamboo, and crushed egg shells when I had to pay the bills. But, I found one (really looking forward to this new company!) and will be moving back to the states in a FEW FREAKING DAYS. I'm looking forward to being moved in, but I'm going to miss my Canadian friends, cheap golf & poutine.

I'm in the moving eye of the hurricane right now, with nearly everything in boxes, including the project. I have one new update: A vinegar/copper test matrix! So, if you've been following the entries, you'll see that I took a patina recipe online, and kept testing it to see what ingredients were actually needed. The original recipe was ammonia, salt & white vinegar. I found that anything with salt made the pigment too clumpy when mixed with walnut oil. Ammonia didn't really help much, and I think I read somewhere that Ammonia + copper = some type of carcinogenic substance (I'm probably wrong; I have NO chemistry background, and I was tired). It turned out that just white vinegar & copper made some really nice blue-green crystals, which mixed really well with walnut oil. (A horrible patina, but a great pigment).

Since white vinegar is not going to be as easy to make as apple vinegar, I decided to try a range of vinegars to see what I could get. I also tried balsamic vinegrette, but it just turned to muck.

The results: four different shades of green! I re-did the white vinegar, and the results are very similar (I have a comparison shot, but am too tired/is not enough room/am saving it for the coffee table book).





I'm guessing the impurities are causing the color changes. No matter, they all look great! (you'll notice on the red wine vinegar, I didn't scrape part of it off, that was because that was where most of the impurities settled)

Back to packing: I decided to clean the patinas that I tested before packing them up. There is an interesting orange/red under the thick green patina layer. I picked it up with some paper towels. I don't know if there is enough color to make a production run, but I just might continue experimenting with this in the months to follow.

Clay, with a side of Eggs

Two pigments were refined this time! Blue clay and eggshells.

For the clay, I used the standard slurry method to settle out the larger particles.

It had been drying in my house for almost a month now, and would still be drying if it weren’t for the fact that I put it next to a heating vent (yeah, this is a proof of concept test to say the least)

Anyway, it actually makes a great dark grey!



In other news, I tried crushing the heck out of eggshells to see what I could some up with. I’ve been grinding them in my mortar and pestle for about a week now, and the particles are still too coarse.








I read a Google search excerpt from Pigment Compendium Set by Nicholas Eastaug, Valentine Walsh, Tracey Chaplin, and Ruth Siddall, (now on my wish list for those out there to those with way too much money on their hands)
It looks like that
a) eggshells were used in the past and were considered as good as lead white, and
b) there are other techniques I need to try to get finer particles.

So, I’ll try those ASAP and then post my results!

By the way, starting with this entry, this blog is have updates every other week entries for the next few months.

Enter the (Copper) Matrix

I thought I had some really promising results with the copper tests I did using the salt, white vinegar & ammonia recipe, so I decided to do a test matrix to see what would work best. (No, it did not include Trinity as played by Carrie-Anne Moss but next time you're in your home town, feel free to drop by and say hi to me & the family), I just tried every ingredient combination.



I got a whole bunch of interesting results. Long story short: Salt seemed to make it hard to disperse in walnut oil (it was all clumpy)






My best result is to only use white vinegar. I also thought I had an incredible blue with an ammonia/white vinegar combo, but after I mixed it with walnut oil, it reacted and turned green.







One other thing, as noted on some of the close-ups, I had reactions between the tests. My guess was that the vinegar & ammonia vapors reacted in the air just above the copper & oxidized it.



So, one more thing to try with copper before moving on: I need to do a few more tests with different types of vinegar. This time I’ll keep the samples a little further apart.

Painting From Scratch: New Host, New Name

Last night I updated this blog, so it is now hosted on the BlogSpot servers, and takes advantage of the neat, new and nifty layout features. Long story short: I don't have to do as much coding to get the features I want, and updating is a lot faster.

Why the name change? There's already an www.artfromscratch.com is already taken. So I registered www.paintingfromscratch.com and www.paintfromscratch.com. They may eventually become the main page for this project, with a link to this very blog. In the meantime, this is the place where all the action is taking place!

All the pictures are now hosted on Picassa. If you just want to look at the pretty pictures, they are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/troy.mcfarland

Cheers,
_TMC

Ultramarine Blue the Hard Way

I’ve been pretty busy with the project this week. First off, I’ve got a spiffy new Project Status Banner at the top of my blog, for easy reference on how far I’ve come. Also, I’m drying out and prepping the green copper rust from last week (hopefully I’ll be able to make it into a pigment for next entry). The blue clay that I’ve refined is taking a VERY long time to dry. I don’t think it’ll make a good grey pigment, but I might as well run the experiment through its paces.

Lastly, I’ve finally gotten around to grinding and mixing the Lapis Lazuli that I picked up at Mountain Gems in Burnaby. The folks at Mountain Gems were very helpful and friendly. I called ahead before I showed up to see if they had any in stock. Not only did they have some, they also emailed me a link on how to prepare it for paint! Talk about great service.

For those not in the know, Lapis Lazuli is a type of rock that used to be made into a pigment for tempra and oils back in the day. When we discovered a way to make the Ultramarine Blue synthetically, its use as a pigment diminished. This is fine, because it’s a beautiful rock for many other purposes (carving, etc). Note to any stone sculptors and jewelers out there: If you’re doing any Lapis sculpture, please contact me so I can take the unusable chips off your hands! This stuff isn’t cheap!

Here’s the samples I bought, with one small piece already crushed. When crushing, it gives off a distinctive odor (which prompted me to put on my painter’s mask). It smells like a hair salon when someone’s getting a perm!



Here’s a sample of the pigment mixed with walnut oil. Note that it is a bit greyer and duller than the stone. That’s most likely due to one of two things: The impurities in the cheaper Chilean stone is diluting the color, or the act of crushing the stone is making it duller. Art Graham mentioned that this can happen to cobalt blue if you create a dispersion incorrectly. (see factory tour notes)



This final shot shows the difference between my first and second batch. The first batch looked really dull to me, and my guess was that my tools were not clean enough (the copper test rusted my palate knife. I thought I got all the rust off, but looks like I was wrong)