I use wood glue most of the time but when I want to make sure objects are held firmly in place, especially small objects, I use epoxy. I have used several brands of epoxy over the years and this is by far my favorite. It is easy to dispense and mix.
I don’t do very many free standing sculptures. I started working on this one sometime in 2023 and got stuck on what to do with it once I got the base and branch put together so it sat on one of the studio counters until a couple of weeks ago when the solution suddenly came to me one evening.
The magnificent Purpur cat with the big face and green-tipped tail dreams of a push-pop lift. | Wood, acrylic paint, wire | 17.25 x 4.75 x 4.75 in (43.8 x 12 x 12 cm) | March 2024
The yellow painted pole is from some broken branches I found from after a wind storm. While it was still fresh I pealed the bark from it. The green broken seat and section the cat and sofa sit on are made from pieces of quarter inch square pine dowel glued together.
A dripping paint jar made from a wooden craft piece I picked up from a hobby store. The floor of the base is a piece of MDF that I had used to mix some paint in a hurry.
I created the face in Affinity Designer and used the paint transfer technique to apply it to the cat. I used some old copper wire for the tail and to attach the head to the body. I used some thin wire I found on a street to make the ears.
To make sure this piece of the assemblage stays securely in place I drilled some hole in the bottom of the sofa legs and cut the heads off four small nails which are glued into the holes with epoxy. After the epoxy sets up I will push the sofa gently in position to mark the location I want the sofa to be placed. I then will drill some holes for the nail points to be placed in with epoxy. Because there isn’t much gluing surface on the bottom of the tiny legs the nails add some extra holding strength.
I have been using this trusty pin vise for several decades to drill tiny holes by hand in tight spots where my cordless drill won’t fit into. I use it quite a bit to drill pilot holes for eye screws when installing hanging wire on my art pieces. I have a few bits that are the width of straight pins and smaller.
Here I am drilling holes in a base to which a small chair will be attached. I added a piece of green Frog Tape to the bit to serve as a depth gauge so the holes will be the same depth. Crude but effective and simple.
I wasn’t sure how this one was going end up when I came up with the idea of doing a tower of pats of butter. I started working on it near the end of 2023 and it sat derelict in a corner of the studio until the end of February 2024. After I started working on the pats of butter again the idea came to me suddenly to make a mini m-house to go on the top of the tower. This is the smallest m-house of the four I have built.
The floor that the slice of bread is resting on is a piece of MDF that I used to help get clean cuts with my hand saw and miter box. I carved the hanging light bulb from a piece of round dowel. The wall socket was made using the paint transfer method with a tiny picture that was laser printed. The little yellow pencil was made from a dowel with words paint transferred on the side.
Atop the butter pats tower, mini m-house discovers one of those sensational moldy ones.
Wood, acrylic paint, paper, wire, paint transfer
13 x 5.75 x 3.5-inches (33 x 14.6 x 8.9-cm)
March 2024
I thought of this one while I was trying to get to sleep one night recently.
I designed a gluing template in Affinity Designer and used some small sticks I purchased from a craft store.
Here are three of the first six chairs waiting for seats bottoms to be installed.
Three down and nine more to go.
I used some construction stakes glued together to build the frame of the assemblage box.
I used 2.5 x .5-inch poplar for the outsides of the frame.
I painted the finished assemblage frame/box with a white undercoat.
The top and outsides have been painted a cream color.
Here is a hanging light bulb I sculpted from a small section of round dowel. The wire is from some old Christmas tree lights.
Painted and ready to be installed at the top inside of the box.
After painting the inside of the box a light blue I poured some light green on the bottom and let it run over the side.
All twelve tiny chairs waiting to be dipped in some paint.
Here it is with the hanging light bulb and a sofa figure installed.
The first two chairs put in place. I used tweezers to immerse each chair in a small jar of yellow paint. After letting some of the paint drip back into the jar I placed them on the sofa figure and let them drip over each other. The paint acts to glue the chairs in place.
Eleven yellow chairs and one white chair. The white chair is the only one that I painted and let dry before dipping the legs in black paint then just the back of the chair in some white paint to help it stick in place and drip some more.
Here is a slice of cake made from a piece of round dowel that was first painted pink then some yellow tape what added to mask some of the pink then some brown paint was painted for the chocolate frosting.
Finished with the slice of cake and a tiny bowling ball added.
Title: Another unsurpassed and haphazard pile of twelve tiny dysfunctional dripping chairs.
Wood, acrylic paint, recycled wire, paint transfer
15.5 x 11 x 3-inches (38 x 28 x 7.6-cm)
February 2024
I have been using an old fine point mimeogragh stencil tool to score fold lines in my art cards. I recently discovered and purchased a scoring tool that works faster and easier.
ek tools scoring board by American Crafts. Works great.
The tool I have been using. It has worked well over the years but it does scratch the paper so that the paper cracks ever so slightly when the paper is folded.
I just couldn’t wait for warmer weather to come so I could set up shop on the balcony to work on some assemblages and saw and sand and make messes out there. I started a new assemblage on Monday last from an idea that came to me while trying to fall asleep. It will be put together on a panel of an old Cayucos painting that I decided I didn’t care for. I have tried a few ideas on this reworked panel so far and maybe this one I will finish.
A newly constructed couch. I will add a couple of cushions.
Painting a white undercoat of paint so the final color will appear without any darker colors showing through.
Painting one of the two I-beams with an undercoat of white.
Both I-beams, two cushions, and the couch with white undercoat drying.
The couch with cushions ready to be painted with a color.
I ripped about 3/16” of each side of the I-beams to make them a bit narrower and I put some nails in the top of each of the wide pieces of wood to help reinforce the glue.
The main elements have been painted and are ready to be assembled.
The couch legs ended up a bit short so I cuts some tiny squares of heavy paper and glued two to each leg to extend them that much. I will then paint them black to match the legs.
The finished piece. As I lay awake the night before last I thought of adding some extra elements to it so I created an 8-ball, tiny cupcake and a hidden surprise behind the light pink I-bean on the left.
Two mismatched pink I-beams, joined together by a mustard couch bridge, awaiting the arrival of a mystic serving of mashed potatoes as advertised.
Wood, acrylic paint, wire on wood panel
15 x 15 x 4-inches (38 x 38 x 10-cm)
February 2024
Here is the hidden element you can only see from the side.
I get a lot of my wood from Home Depot and most of it is poplar. Most of the time I need to use every bit of the wood where I need to use both sides of it. Unfortunately there are these price stickers that are very hard to pull off. I think they must use these tenacious stickers in order to keep people from changing the price on a piece of wood and ripping the store off. It just makes more work for us honest folk to get them off the wood.
On my way home from walking to post some mail recently I thought autumn leaves on the sidewalk might make a nice picture. So I created this painting back in November of last year and it has become one of my favorites.
3000 x 3000 px. | Infinite Painter 7. | Galaxy Tab S7 tablet
Colors have been blocked in for the leaves and adding some detail to them comes next. The sidewalk is mostly composed on two layers and the dark stipple texture came about by one of those happy accidents when I filled the background on one layer with a gray color while a layer below was still visible.
I thought this was the finished result. But then…
…I was wanting to put something in the picture that shouldn't fit and finally found the apple I was looking for in a few some friends gave us. Now it's finished.
The Post Office in the tiny town of Harmony on the California central coast along Hwy 1 was opened in 1914 and ceased operation in 2008.
Here is a picture of the three PG&E smoke stacks with power plant buildings as seen looking east from Morro Strand State Beach, Morro Bay, California.
Several tools and filters in the Snapseed app were used to rework the original image taken with the camera on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra phone.
If you are in Salt Lake City, Utah or live nearby come to the opening or stop in and see of my work as well as work by other fabulous artists. There is something for everyone at the Phillips Gallery.
So far this is one of my favorites of Morro Rock pictures. I did most of the up front work on my Galaxy S22 Ultra phone but had some trouble when it came to using the Double Exposure feature. It did not want to complete the operation when I tried to import the second image. I had to perform that operation in Snapseed on my Galaxy Tab S7 tablet and finished the final image there.
This is the original image taken with the camera on my Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra phone.
After cropping the original I use some of the options of the Tune Image tool to adjust the Ambiance and Brightness. This allowed more detail to appear overall especially in the rock.
I used some of the filters to give the image a little contrast and changed the colors. The next black and white image was imported over this one using the Double Exposure tool.
I made a black and white version with a bit of drama added and grainy appearance. This image was imported over the previous color image using the Double Exposure tool.
Here is the result of using both of the previous images using the Double Exposure tool. After playing around with the opacity slider I decided the default 50% opacity setting gave the best result.
In this final version I used the Brush tool to increase the saturation in the sand and waves and the green vegetation at the base of the rock leaving the sky as is. I also used one of the Frame options to give the image a little bit more interest.
Playing around with Snapseed some more. I don’t start any of these pictures with an object in mind. I just open an image in Snapseed and start playing around with various filters and effects till I end up with something I like. Sometimes they don’t turn out well and I end up scrapping them or try and save an image but am told by the app that it couldn’t be saved (for some reason).
I used several affects in Snapseed then opened it in Infinite Painter 7 to give the beak a yellow color. I took this image of this black bird on a trip in September of 2018 perched on a metal pipe outside the Cayucos Deli in Cayucos, Cayucos, California.
Here is a scene at Moonstone beach at Cambria, California on the central coast. The original image was taken on a trip in September 2021.
This one started out with a slightly different idea in mind but after letting it sit inactive on the work table for a few months this is how it ended up. I usually don’t varnish my paintings but decided to do so with this one to help punch up the colors. Instead of using square panels like I normally do I chose to use 11 x 14-inch panels for this two panel bolted together painting.
I used yellow FROGTAPE (for delicate surfaces) to mask off areas where I wanted to spread paint over and I used scrap paper to blot areas of paint after it was applied to achieve some visual texture. I use discarded plastic gift cards to spread paint. I use a couple of old dilapidated foam sanding blocks to smooth and buff the paint.
I used sixteen color mixes on this one most of which are original as they came from the DIY store with a few that I custom mixed using some of those original colors.
Latex acrylic paint on cradled wood panels bolted together | 11 x 28 x 1.5 inches (28 x 71 x 3.8 cm) | October 2023
The two 11 x 14-inch panels ready to be fastened together.
Two .25-inch diameter 2-inch long bolts were inserted through .25-inch diameter holes and the panels bolded together with lock nuts.
I played around with a couple of images in Snapseed that I captured on one of our trips to California. Each one has an after and before version. Use the arrow buttons at the sides of each image to view the original color version. The first image is of a hill along Hwy 58 heading east above Bakersfield. The second image is of a beach at Cayucos.
A beautiful way to end a beautiful day at the beach.
Here are some textures I have come across while walking or standing.
I got the inspiration for this one from the movie "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman”
Although it appeared to be, it wasn't really an attack of the 50-ft. cow.
Wood, acrylic paint, laser cut MDF, bottle cap
I just started this one a couple of days ago but I don't know just how it's going to turn out so stay tuned. I even have a subtitle for it already.
