When life gives you yard waste

Add fire.  Always.

BUT... if you are careful, you can extract something useful, too.

Fire, as we view it, is a chemical reaction.  We are watching the products of a combustion reaction beautifully expand to illuminate and warm whatever we chuck next to them, be it marshmallows or a piston engine.  Oxygen is essential to get this reaction to go and so, if you limit the amount of air that gets to your yard waste (carbon rich fuel), you get an incomplete reaction.  There is still plenty left to burn on another fire... so, you have charcoal.

Now, you are playing roulette with your health if you use yard waste to make charcoal for cooking; there are some potentially lethal chemicals in the plants about your yard.  Additionally, these 'charcoal' bits are hardly the ingots we need to feed a fire with any degree of cleanliness or practicality.  Being useless for everyday survival, it seems like we are talking about art now.  Funny how that worked itself out...

Enter, wisteria trimmings:

Most of these vines are small, so they will make charcoal sticks that are far too fragile to draw with.  These small ones will be pulverized and used as pigment (more on that later).  Only big sticks will be kept for drawing charcoal.  It should be noted that wisteria is traditional as a drawing charcoal source.  The other common one is grape vines.  But I tend towards decorative and not useful plants, so there you go.  Did I mention that it is almost February and I am only now getting around to autumn pruning?

1. wisteria (or grape) vines

2. pruners/cutty thing

3. metal can with top lid removed

4. aluminium foil

5. fire source of your choice (more below) 

Cut your vines down to lengths that can fit into your can, then pack them in.

Use the foil to tightly cover the can on the top and sides.  Remember, you are trying to have a smothered fire going, an incomplete combustion reaction because of limited oxygen.  Some oxygen still needs to be there, so do not enclose the can.  Water vapor and other gas needs to escape, too.

Not the most glamorous angle, but, life is tough when you are a can.

I am using charcoal briquettes, lit to keep a flame, in a Weber kettle for my fire source.  Plus, I needed to cook something.  It should be noted that you really are not looking to add meaty-goodness into your drawing materials, so keep anything that will drip juices well away.

So, the can is going to sit in the fire (I am keeping the vents open on the top of the kettle) for about ten hours.  Basically, I let it sit over night, let the fire burn out, and then went to get it the next morning.

I'd say it's past medium-rare:

Peel back the foil and see the finished charcoal.

Yay!  Incomplete combustion!!  If more oxygen had weaseled in there, you would be left with white ash and not that iridescent black.

There still is ash and bits of sloughed-off bark in the bottom of the can.  Dump out the finished charcoal and pick out the useful bits.

Not bad for yard waste, no?

Now, all of the small vines will break when you draw with them.  So, put those aside for another project.  You have made pigment, suitable for paint emulsions and other mediums.  It is closest to Lamp Black in coloring and origin, but I feel like it deserves a more festive name which gives due reverence to the grilled chicken.  Any ideas?

Big Oops, or how to refinish wood in a hurry

Accidents happen.

This one was avoidable.  I spilled ink on an unfinished wood table.  I knew better.  We all know better.  But it just seemed like a hassle to tarp the table.  I need to fix it in a hurry.

Okay, so this is a spill on unfinished wood.  The first thing to realize when you make a spill is to determine if the liquid is going to stay on the surface or if it is going to sink in.  Unfinished wood will generally absorb the liquid and will pull it deep into the grain.  If the liquid seems to be forming a meniscus and staying on the surface, don't disturb it and let it dry.  If not, get a cloth IMMEDIATELY.  Do not try to get a wet sponge and blot it out; the increase in moisture will only drive the stain deeper into the wood.

Once dry, just get a medium to fine grit sandpaper and sand off the stain.  Below is one of the ink spills after a few minutes of sanding.

It is pretty quick and simple.  After you get the stain sanded off, wipe the table down with a sponge.  While the wood is still damp, take some sandpaper designed for wet sanding and do a quick pass on the table top.  After the wood dries, you will have a perfect surface.  Sometimes, the new surface is even nicer than the one you started with.

The picture below is of the table top partially dried but fully sanded.

This particular ink removal took me about 20 minutes.... and now I will deny that it ever happened.

Picking out Adhesives

While I am waiting for the paste papers to dry, it seems like a good time to talk glue.  I'm going to try not to use too many puns in this post, but I will have a hard time sticking to that.  And so it begins...

Alright, so there are a bunch of adhesives out there and they are all geared for different applications.  Honestly, you can get through most projects with just a few things.  This is my wonder team:

The wood glue is self explanatory.  It is for wood.  In all seriousness though, it is pretty great.  When it dries, it holds as strong as a nail.

The ATG gun and ATG tape are fabulous.  I use this for all my present wrapping and for assembling invitations.  It is a very sticky pressure adhesive that will hold many different materials AND you can rub off extra bits of this tape, like you would with rubber cement.  Really good stuff.

The bag of flour is going to become paste.  Paste is reversible.  That is its main selling point.  It will hold delicate things together and you can soak it off if you want to undo the process.  I mostly use it for paste papers, decoupage, and lining documents for conservation/restoration.

And now my favorite: PVA.  Polyvinyl acetate is just essential.  It is water based, archival, dries clear and flexible, sticks to just about everything, and you can reactivate it after it is dry with heat.  Many commercial branded adhesives and decoupage products are PVA based.  For instance, if you wanted to make up collage medium (a very popular product) it is just PVA mixed with an acrylic gel.  You can mix this up yourself way cheaper than buying it.  PVA is often marketed as bookbinding glue.  This is the main glue that I use for bookbinding and art making. 

You can get ATG products at many places.  I tend to buy mine through Blick and just wait until they are having one of their crazy sales.  I can tell you from personal experience that this tape becomes less sticky after it has been sitting around on the roll unused for a few years.  So don't buy a life time supply in one go.
http://www.dickblick.com/
It can be expensive to buy PVA unless you are getting it in large quantities.  I get it from Talas.  They sell PVA as 'Jade' and I use their 'Jade 403' formulation.  It should be noted that they also give you a more concentrated glue (less added water) than other suppliers.  I also get my paste ingredients from Talas.
http://www.talasonline.com/
Wood glue is from wherever it is cheapest.  Or just purchased in the middle of an emergency.

Reverse Glass Painting

I bought an unfinished box at a craft store a while ago; you know, one of those cheap ones made of pine and with the crummy hinges and latches.  I think this one was supposed to be 'finished' by the home crafter as a jewelry box.  Well, I promptly butchered it.  I busted out all the interior compartments, removed the hardware, and I attached the top and the bottom 'lid' so I can build a sliding drawer to go in it.   I think that I will also build on all the trims and add some legs.  The main reason that I bought this box (as I am pretty much breaking down and rebuilding everything), is the pane of glass which is inlaid in the top lid.  It looked like....a new place to craft, muahahaha!!!

So I had an idea to make a reverse glass painting, collage, gilded...thing.  Ultimately, I decided to paint the birds and the eggs on paper, so I could get better detail and rendering.  There is a long history of reverse glass painting, but seeing really good examples of 'technical' reverse glass painting is fairly uncommon.  All the rules on how traditional painting works have to be abandoned.  Either you blend in one layer of paint or you layer many layers of compositionally identical paint.  The take away message is that you can mess it up without a lot of practice.  Practice wasn't going to happen here. 

Collage it is!

Since a sizing would need to go down for the gold leaf, I decided to use the sizing as my adhesive for the paper.  Paint went down first, then size, then paper, then more paint, then more size, and lastly the gold leaf.  Okay, I admit, I am not using my real gold leaf here; this is just the composition stuff.  Besides the fact that I am not using the good stuff on something that is just for my personal amusement, the composition leaf oxidizes beautifully.  I really like how it tarnishes into this chatoyance and iridescent rainbow.  Sometimes it pays to be cheap.

I think that I am going to carry through the idea of a 'Nest Box' on the inside, both in decoration and even with objects.  I have quite a few bird eggs and I think that they might enjoy a home in here.

Back to work!

Some general background on reverse glass painting:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_glass_painting

And my main complaint on the wiki page above, is that they don't mention the most famous modern use of reverse glass painting.  The Blue Rider Group, a sub-unit in German Expressionism, really embraced the tradition of Bavarian glass painting (in addition to their other traditional revivals) and made some lovely pieces.  So here is a basic overview on them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Rider