Back in San Francisco. LA was a blast -- lots of adventures and lots of work done. I'm stoked about creating the images for a promotional brochure we need. Going back to an old medium that I haven't used in a while but am itching to get back into my hands: chalk. I'll post some images when it's done.

Meantime, turns out it's spring break so no furniture-making class this week. I did rough up the bough of the spoon a little bit so now, it's all ready to be shellacked and finished. Some images:

I'm sick. Going to LA tomorrow to work on finalizing the Hollywood Fringe Logo, and I think the basic website look, art for collateral, some conceptual art for the actual festival itself, etc -- I'm really looking forward to it and can't wait to work with these guys. That's why I slept till 3:30pm today and am just getting ready to go back to bed... at the rockstar hour of 8:30pm. And even if my cough and asthma haven't gone away by tomorrow, I'll always have benadryl. Well, Wal-dryl. When you do art in these here parts, you don't get the name brand stuff. The wal-products works just fine.


(Caption: Hopefully what's going on in my body as we speak)

I consulted with John McNees, my furniture-making teacher, last night (cool guy... he knows everything, and hilarious too) about finishes, and we decided that a shellac would look the best. I know it won't be functional in terms of putting it on food, but the spoon over time has become primarily decorative so I'm okay with that. I put on some reddish-brown paint washes on the branch part of the spoon today. There are a lot of elements going on right now: the lightest part of the spoon, the inlaid cherry blossoms, the brown branch... but I'm putting my chips in the hope that the shellac will tie it all together. I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

I've been trying to decide what to make for the final project in class and I've narrowed it down to three choices: a valet chair with a hand carved nature motif in the back of it, a japanese-styled stool with a painted design on the seat, or a thin tapering bookshelf with some hand carved elements. I'm really excited about them all and would be happy with any of them, but we'll see. I'm sort of leaning towards the valet chair right now.

Some pictures of the spoon right now:

I just finished making and putting in the inlays. I wanted to have kind of an impressionistic look to the cherry blossoms and experimented lots of different ways to do it, but finally what I did was get a few strips of the thin wood edging you use to cover up plywood edges and paint them flat red. Once dry, I painted them white on top and then sanded away the white to various degrees so that the red came through in scratchy spurts. I cut them out and then glued them in place. I decided that the color of the cherry blossoms definitely need to be offset with a darker colored branch so I'm going to explore options for that today. I'm worried about putting a finish on top of the paint for the cherry blossoms, so unless there's some very gentle forgiving finish out there that doesn't use paint thinner, maybe I'll keep it unfinished. I would like to tie all the elements together with a common finish so this would be a compromise. Some pictures:

I prepared the spoon for the cherry blossom inlays today. I kind of like the way it looks just with the shapes cut out and I'm definitely going to explore just that look for projects in the future. After this, it's just assembly and finishing. Here's to hoping. A picture:

I put some finishing sculptural touches on the spoon last night, and I'm pleased with how it's come out. I've noticed that the piece of wood that I've been using has some very strange grain, layered and blocky almost, which has been making it difficult to get the smooth furrows I wanted in the wood, but I got close to what I wanted with time. Right now, I'm experimenting with different ways to deal with the cherry blossoms, and I'm trying to decide if I want to color the wood part of the spoon. Here's some photos of it at this stage:

I guess at this point I can say that as usual, it's been a very very busy time. I've been working on completing the logo and other graphics for the Hollywood Fringe Festival, which people are going to be hearing a lot more about in 2009. They're such a great group of people, and I'm so excited to be working with them... I'm not going to show the logo here yet, but I'm really happy with it.

Otherwise, I've been working on some greeting cards, which will make an appearance here soon, another website, I'll have a few more wire sculptures and stencils done in the next month or so, and on top of it all, I've been taking a woodcarving and furniture making class. Our first assignment was to make a spoon, or treen of some kind. I like to make sushi at home, so I decided to make a Shamoji, or a rice paddle used to spread rice for the roll. I decided to go with a Japanese inspired cherry blossom idea, with the branch being at once what the spoon is carved out of and as the spoon tapers, the branch is confined and cut off by the line of the spoon.

I finished the major carving last week. Most of the other students had their flat piece of wood that was planed down to thickness and that was the flatness of their spoon, but since the flat part of my spoon was in the middle of the design, I had to chip away all the wood to be able to create another flat plane. Almost nobody in the class has any idea what I'm doing and they all think I'm insane, but I think it's going to turn out pretty good. I'm going to try to finish up a few shape issues tomorrow, and then comes the task of somehow inlaying the cherry blossoms, then staining the branch part of the wood, and then finishing. Shouldn't take too long... expect to be done by next week. Here are some shots of it right now:














And here's the original design, to give an idea of (hopefully) how it'll turn out: