Day 170 - 365/2014

Day One Hundred Seventy

Yikes -- I didn't realize how late it is -- I hope I can squeeze this post in by midnight!

Because I am feeling very unwell + hurting today I am using this as a thinking/planning day.

The first project I have been thinking about/planning/working on is the call for artists at Detroit Artists Market.  This is the If You Build It, They Will Come show...they had you come down and select five pieces of wood and then you get to do whatever you want to with it (within their suggestions/guidelines)...mainly that it be no bigger than 24x24 and priced at roughly $250 so that new, young collectors can afford to buy it.  The finished piece can be 2D or 3D and you can chop up the wood, add it to a painting/collage, build a sculpture, etc...it is up to you. 

These are the five pieces I chose...I especially liked the two pieces that have the long and deep cracks in them -- they will be easy to pull apart and use for arms/legs.

But first I will need to do a lot of sanding...both for my safety while working on the piece and then for the safety and eye appeal, as well as the tactile experience of the viewers and new owner.

The first piece broken apart.

I had to remove quite a bit of jagged and split wood shards before I could sand it.

I think the two pieces have turned out pretty well (so far).

I like that they do not exactly match any more but that they are obviously from the same piece of wood.  I love the feel of smoothed, sanded wood.  I round off the edges, too.

Yikes -- here is one of the broken off pieces from the second piece of wood...this will need a LOT of removal.

After the removal of shards, but before sanding.

These turned out pretty nicely, too.  I totally wore down my last two sanding pads for my Black & Decker Mouse (electric hand sander) -- I will get more tomorrow -- but it is also sort of a good thing because it forces me to stop the sanding for today.  Even with the Mouse it takes quite a long time and man, it really wears my hands/wrists down...the vibrations really get to you after a while.

Then I started to stack the pieces to see how I might make a guy.  This is well under the 24-inch limit.

So is this...I haven't decided yet whether to go with four legs (and trim the two long pieces to match the length of the shorter ones) or make a two-legged guy.

Closer to the 24-inch thing, but still under.

Another configuration.

And another, with a sixth piece of wood from my stash added to the five DAM pieces.

I think I like this version if I go two-legged.

The other pieces would be arms...I will build hands/fingers for them...probably trim them a bit, too.

The ol' "hands up" pose...still under the 24" in all directions.

The other thing I am thinking about/planning is a collage for my friend Terri.  She staked a claim on the banjo player Animal People dog guy when I first started making this current batch.  He is too big to fit onto one of the blocks so he went into my "other projects" stash of Animal People.  I am not proud to admit this but I am also not going to try to hide the fact that when I set these larger Animal People aside for safe-keeping they were so "safe" I could not locate them...until today by accident while I was moving stuff on the shelf near my desk.  Whew!  So I've asked Terri to maybe give me an idea or two of something she'd like to see in the collage.  When I make the Animal People collages I pretty much do not do commissions or make them for any one person in particular because I start to overthink the collage and then it doesn't come out so well.  Once in a blue moon I can pull it off -- sort of...but not usually.  So we will see what Terri suggests and go from there.

The stash of larger Animal People that was set aside for safe-keeping.

Terri's banjo guy.

This is what Terri chose as my end of the trade we made for one of her collages.  I hope she will like it in the end when it is complete...I am anxious to get started on it now that I have found it again.  huh -- I wonder why this text is in a caption box (like for a photo) but it doesn't show up in the edit.