Today is the thirteenth of the month, a day normally reserved for JSVB Ungood Art Day. Every Ungood Art Day, I present some piece of mine that started off its journey with the best of intentions but somehow fell off the rails.
The thirteenth of October is also my wife's birthday, something that doesn't intersect well with Ungood Art Day. Sometimes on this day I'll post birthday stuff, but today I have to report the unceremonious end of my Great Canadian Hockey Puck project. Tomorrow, I'll post a little on my wife's birthday.
The idea for these pucks was to have them painted with hockey pictures to sell for Christmas. Nobody seems to paint hockey pucks, so I decided to try the techniques I learned from writing religious icons. Gesso primer sticks to puck rubber, so I felt I had a good start.
Sanding the gesso to make the surface smooth turned into a disaster, though: the pucks all turned brown. Nobody will buy a brown puck. The options were to re-prime the pucks (time consuming) or simply paint them white again (leaves a rough surface). I decided to paint them white, which worked. Time was short, though.
To speed things up, I set upon the idea of using heat transfer to set mass-produced images on the pucks, rather than having to detail each image by hand. Heat, it turns out, causes the gesso to peel off the puck like a decal. This isn't high heat either, just a friendly puff of warm air from a hair dryer.
Time has run oout on this project. I don't like letting it go, but I don't have any positive feeling about it, either. People will just have to do without hand-painted hockey pucks this Christmas. Oh well, there's always the Poopsie Slime Surprise Unicorn.
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