#project fail

This is Distant Star 3 from 2010.

Sometimes, the projects don't work out as well as I would like, but I think it's important to show the failures as well as the successes. This is a fail, because I am both stubborn and lazy sometimes.

There are all kinds of things that read out-of-balance in the bird's design, from body shape to feather layering. I mean, really, is it a funky chicken or is it a raptor? Some feathers are layered "forward" and some "backward".

What was I thinking?

Why didn't I fix it when it was still in the pencil-drawing stage? WHYYYYYYY?

...Because I'm stubborn and lazy. I just couldn't be arsed to fix it. I've gotten most of that foolish mindset out of my system at this point, and I will scrap a drawing and start over to get it "right" - for Rachael-values of right - before I proceed to ink or color.

What I do like is the color balance and pattern arrangements, and the fun thing I tried with the super-simple background. While I wouldn't want to sell a piece like this because of the anatomical weirdness and personal dissatisfaction, I want to remember this pattern and color scheme, and the background thing. I will try again with another member of the series. Because I am stubborn.

Sometimes I have good ideas. Sometimes I have bad ones...

While I love my collection of natural dyed fabrics so far, I’ve found a major flaw in my plan to perhaps sew a baby quilt from them. The soft pinks and peaches turn out to resemble a subset of the human flesh tone range, a fact that is accentuated by tiling and haphazard piecing... 

During daylight hours it’s charming and cute and hippie-ish. Having gazed upon it last night, stoned and under different lighting conditions, I now cannot un-see the human skin patchwork it resembles.

I’ve been repeating “remember when we did things?” to A with an increasingly frantic tone these days... in attempt to stay calm and do things, have resumed playing with sugar. 

Put butter, cornstarch, and a pinch of salt in this latest batch and poured out some at 120°C to try and pull taffy but it was far far too soft/sticky (but damn tasty). Will try again w/ a better temperature range to work from.

Have been interested in custom casting with sugar though none of the food safe mold making supplies I have can handle the required temp range. Tried powdered sugar “sand casting” and it turned out so-so. Would work better for larger/flatter items- the main flaws came from me knocking sugar into the mold cavity during the pour. 

It's supposed to be filled in with string!! 🤣

I went to the Make Fair this year, where I found the Enchanted Leaves booth. Staffed by very nice people, they were selling electroforming kits and sharing the details of the process. 

While I should probably have bought a kit, I in fact sorta’ had a lot of the supplies at home from pervious projects (which I apparently have no existing posts for on any of my blogs...?).  Years ago I tried electrolytic etching with a friend (it went so-so) and never tossed the supplies. 

Picked up a bottle of graphite and tried to make some conductive paint. Turns out the first batch I made was no good (why didn’t I think to test it before trying to plate first?) Then mixed up a more concentrated batch and tried again. Still pretty resistive... but it started to do stuff.

What’d it do? It made a mess. The various electroforming posts/pages say if it’s salmon pink your current is too low and if it’s dark, it’s too high.  Well, all I’ve got is a vague stripped power adapter that spits out something capped at 6V/1800mA... and my tests did start to plate, briefly, and then got super burnt out and the plating (later) easily flaked away... 

So... probably need to get a more controllable power source... those run, what, ~$60 on Amazon and I don’t know if it’s worth it... was just a test project idea to try out a couple ideas.  My copper sulfate solution is sooooo fucked up from years of crap/not cleaning that I doubt it’d even work well, even if I ran the right power through it...