1562 - To Fifty And Beyond

I turned a sketch of my wife into her birthday party invitation.  The party was extremely nice: great food, lovely company, and the BC Lions even beat the top team in the league. 

 

1561 - Brown Pucks Of Near-Infinite Regret

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.

1560 - Vial Artwork

"Wow, that's really, really vial," my wife said medicatively. 

 

1559 - A Small Bat

Just a small piece of batty clip-art, drawn quickly.  

 

1558 - Archangel III

I decided on the colours for the new angel: dark green and rose gold.  The armour will be silver.  I've started painting in the face.  It looks like a mask now: successive layers of thin paint will blend the colours. 

1557 - The Maltese FedEx

Me shipping artwork.  Guess which book this exact quote is from.  If you get it right, award yourself 10,000 Style Points. HINT: it's a trick question.  ALSO: the exchange rate today for Style Points into Real Points is fifty-five hundred million Style Points equals one Real Point. FINALLY: I generally ship with Purolator rather than FedEx. I buy Canadian!  Plus, the courier is usually very good about shipping artwork.

Good luck!