Baby (Blue) Steps

I finally did a sound check at our house. One of the things that has been slowing my progress (besides Valve's Orange Box-O-Distractions) is my worry that I'll wake Ravenna up at night. So, I cranked some music in the garage & listened in her room. Barely can hear it!

I crushed some Azurite tonight & ground it into a powder. I wore a particle mask, but when I took it off after I was done, there was no burning hair smell like Lapis Lazuli. I then mixed it with water, so the finer particles will settle on the top. I've read that mixing it with soap & boiling it will leave the good stuff on the top, but I didn't want to go through all the trouble, so went with the slower way.

Since I was at it, I also did the same for the crushed eggshell in another container. Both formed bubbles, and the azurite had a lot of floating pigment on top, as you would expect when mixing flour with water the wrong way. I'll hopefully get some photos soon.

Good News & Bad News

From Troy McFarland: Art From Scratch

I've been reading The Materials & Techniques of Medieval Painting By Daniel V. Thompson on the bus for a couple of weeks now.

I'm pleasantly surprised that some of the techniques I came up with to create a pigment are listed in here. For example, I took a patina recipe on the web (salt, ammonia, & vinegar), and experimented with it until I found that using just vinegar produces the best pigment. This was done a variety of ways in Medieval times for the same reason. The pigment is called 'Verdigris', also described in the book as an 'acetate of copper'.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that I just did an MSDS search on the effects of Copper (II) acetate, and it is not safe at all. Here's the MSDS, and here is the wiki entry on it.

By the way, vinegar fumes will create lead white pigment, which is potentially even scarier than copper (but not by much, it would seem)

I may continue to use this green pigment, but maybe it would be safer to stick with ground malchite.

Hazards listed on the MSDS site (thankfully I've been using a resperator & keeping Ravenna out of the garage with working with it):

Emergency Overview
--------------------------
DANGER! CAUSES EYE BURNS. HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED. CAUSES IRRITATION TO SKIN AND RESPIRATORY TRACT.

SAF-T-DATA^(tm) Ratings (Provided here for your convenience)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Health Rating: 2 - Moderate (Life)
Flammability Rating: 1 - Slight
Reactivity Rating: 1 - Slight
Contact Rating: 3 - Severe
Lab Protective Equip: GOGGLES & SHIELD; LAB COAT & APRON; VENT HOOD; PROPER GLOVES; CLASS D EXTINGUISHER
Storage Color Code: Green (General Storage)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Potential Health Effects
----------------------------------

Inhalation:
Causes irritation to respiratory tract, symptoms may include coughing, sore throat, and shortness of breath. May result in ulceration and perforation of respiratory tract. When heated, this compound may give off copper fume, which can cause symptoms similar to the common cold, including chills and stuffiness of the head.
Ingestion:
May cause burning pain in the mouth, esophagus, and stomach. Hemorrhagic gastritis, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, metallic taste, and diarrhea may occur. If vomiting does not occur immediately systemic copper poisoning may occur. Symptoms may include capillary damage, headache, cold sweat, weak pulse, kidney and liver damage, central nervous excitation followed by depression, jaundice, convulsions, blood effects, paralysis and coma. Death may occur from shock or renal failure.
Skin Contact:
May cause irritation with redness and pain.
Eye Contact:
Corrosive. May cause irritation, redness, pain, blurred vision, discoloration, and damage.
Chronic Exposure:
Prolonged or repeated skin exposure may cause dermatitis. Prolonged or repeated exposure to dusts of copper salts may cause discoloration of the skin or hair, blood and liver damage, ulceration and perforation of the nasal septum, runny nose, metallic taste, and atrophic changes and irritation of the mucous membranes.
Aggravation of Pre-existing Conditions:
Persons with pre-existing skin disorders, impaired liver, kidney, or pulmonary function, glucose 6-phosphate-dehydrogenase deficiency, or pre-existing Wilson's disease may be more susceptible to the effects of this material.

Screw the Canvas!

So, I've been reading the book "The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting" by Daniel V. Thompson.  (Thanks for the Christmas present cousin Debbie!) It's a great read, and I highly recommend it. Anyway, I've never really liked painting on canvas.  It's a hard to do detail work with all those bumps.  Reading his book, I've found that the surface of choice back in the day was wood panels, primed & prepared with gesso and plaster and other stuff.  With glue made from cheese.  Thats just too cool!  Who knew that cheese and lime could make glue?!

I've been avoiding the whole making the canvas part of this project for a while.  I mean, canvas involves growing stuff, and rotting (er, I mean retting) and beating the crap out of it, then spinning it & weaving it etc. 

 

I don't know what it is, but I just don't like most fabric arts.  There was some really huge 'soft sculptures'  (let's be honest, they were stuffed plushies on steroids) at a modern art museum the first time I went to LA.  I was not impressed.  I just couldn't take it seriously.

Now wood is a different story.  To make a wood panel, I first will need to make some wicked cool metal tools.  That means I'll have to do pretty much everything except maybe the smelting.  Casting, forging, sharpening, trying to figure out if I really need to smelt tin to mix with copper to make bronze or if *ANYONE* on earth had tin back in 4004 BC.  That could be very cool.  

Cool, because this will involve fire, furnaces, hacking and cutting.  The artistic equivalent of shoveling the snow in the dead of winter while exiled in Siberia. I'm pretty sure I can work carving in there if I try hard enough.  Actually a lot of wood panels had carved inlays in the work.  So there.  I can.  

I'm much more excited about this now.  Anyone know the building codes of Seattle, and if permits are needed for kilns & furnaces and the like in one's backyard?

Time to get back on the horse

Well, after too much time spent on video games and surfing the web, my computer recently succumbed to a nasty Vundo trojan.  (I'm writing this on my wife's Mac). 

Sidenote:  I recommend against surfing the web for the lyrics to Cyndi Lauper's "She-Bop"  Bigger waste of time than I could have imagined.  If you do, do it on a Mac, or at least have all your software up to date.  Vundo is nasty and now I need to nuke & pave my machine!

So, for the last couple of days, I've stayed away from the computer at home.  When I got home tonight, I had some late Christmas presents from my cousin Debby  arrive.  In addition to a very cool Richard Cheese CD & Golf Journal, I got the book: The Materials and Techniques of Medieval Painting by Daniel V Thompson. Talk about great timing!  I've already read the Lapis Lazuli section, and am hoping to make it through Azurite shortly.  Finally I can put that expensive hunk of rock to good use!

Maybe I shouldn't have gotten those games...

Considering how much Art From Scratch work I've done recently, maybe I should have reconsidered buying the Orange Box as a reward for getting my webhosting mess in order.

Curse you Valve! Your games are too good! And I just bought Half Life for 98 cents last night and played it waaay too long!

By the way, my wife knows why it's called Half-Life. It's because that's how much time has been taken from my other activities.

Random, The other blog.

I realize that I shouldn't be putting too many non-art related ideas in this blog. And politics don't belong here either. So I created a new blog for such items.:
http://troymcfarland.blogspot.com/

If random ramblings interest you, I hope you'll visit.

Cheers,
Troy

He DID make his own tools... sort of

I rented "Alone in the Wilderness" from Scarecrow Video (The Powell's bookstore of video rentals... if you can't find it here, and they don't know how to get it, the tape cannot be found), and Dick made the handles for his tools. His reasoning was that it would be easier to pack into the area. This video is really worth watching. He wasn't a sport hunter, and wasn't a hippie. He hunted and grew his own food and respected the land. He reminded me a lot of my Grandpa Dow.