A few of the many uses I’ve found for the stuff:

- Keeping paint wet.  Are you an artist that paints?  Do you mix your paints on a pallete with little cups around the edges?  Grab a zip lock bag and put it on top of the cups when you are cleaning out the brushes and are ready to leave for the night (I use the gallon ones to cover more space), and then put a handful of sculpey on top of the bag and mold it around the cups to create what is basically an airtight seal on it.  Use the bag to keep the sculpey from going in to the paint.  I guess in theory you could put the sculpey in the paint itself since it’s oil based and acrylic is water based, but the bag makes things a lot nicer and cleaner.  Don’t use cheap bags… use ziplock since it’s got more watertight seal.

- Stress Relief.  It’s a lot like a stress relief ball.  You might want to put it in a baloon or something though since it does leave a residue on your hands… not enough to really be ‘dirty’ but enough that you will likely want to wash your hands before doing too much other stuff.

- Spacing/ventilation.  I love to put ‘feet’ made of sculpey on electronic equipment that gets hot.  Don’t do this for laptops since it may be way too hot there as it’ll make the stuff too soft and mushy, but for electronic equipment like cable boxes, satellite reception boxes, and other gizmos and gadgets that usually sit on desks and get warm to the touch it’s great. 

- blocking out light.  Got LED lights on your electronic gizmos and gadgets that are way too bright?  Put a dab of sculpey on top to create a filter.  You don’t have to block out all the light… really light application can act as a tint/shade that just dulls the light down a bit.  Many manufacterrs have gone to using LED but just don’t know how to make them dim enough to not hurt your eyes…

- Holding up things… I’ve used sculpey to hold up pie pans to help create reflectors for indoor rabbit ear type antennas in basements before… You can use it for all sorts of actual sculpture uses like this since this is what the stuff really is made to do.

EA was the diety of water

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ea_(Babylonian_god)

AE is a breathy sound that is very similar to what seems to be the way Yahweh is pronounced.  Yahweh is the name of God in the Jewish and Christian Religions…  The ‘breathe of life’ has a lot to do with this idea too. 

Both EA AND AE are very similar to sounds that man makes when he is urinating or defecating… ???…  the sound of the A at the end seems like it may be closer to the sound that comes when someone is breathing out while urinating and the E at the end the sound that is closer to what someone is making when straining to make a bowel movement?…  interesting connection – eh?

In Buddhism and other Eastern religions the ideas of breathing has a lot to do with a lot of things, and the idea of chi has a lot to do with it too… the idea is that Chi is stored inside of an area near the stomache – coincidence?

Adam was the ‘universal man.’  Surely the universal man occassionally had some flatulance, especially if he was eating apples sometimes.

Some new age ideas evolve around the idea that the sound MI (you know the sound after Do Rand RE in the musical scale) has some religious/philosophical/healing powers.  This is a tone/pitch that could be related to both EA and AE in some cases..?

The hoax/rumor/myth of Jabulon that’s online is an story about how freemasons tried to connect JAH, BAAL, and ON, i.e. Jah as in Yahweh (Jewish God), Baal (Lord/Master the Phoenician/Cannanite God) , and Osiris (Egyptian God)… it’s mostly false according to online sources… but it’s just an interesting idea that could be applied here… maybe all religions all basically have the same beginnings?

As the pressure is released the feeling of relief that comes may be what the original originators of the religions were inspired by and amplified as their thoughts of gods?

Blashemy?  Maybe… interesting connection/coincidence – maybe?  Just something to think about…

God be with you.

http://penny-arcade.com/resources/an-update1.html

Live

Drips

Bottomless Landscape

10.25.2011

10.24.2011

Acrylic Landscape

11.21.2011

Ended up taking the sharp edge of one of my many chisels since I used it as a plexi-glass cutter. It worked well though and I have plenty of other chisels. Hopefully the 60w lamp won’t melt the plexi. As long as I don’t make my sessions using it super long I don’t think that’ll be a problem. If it is, plexi is easy to replace. I probably should be using glass instead of plexi but since I’m planning on using a lot of pointillism techniques that will require a lot of banging a pencil against it I figure plexi is better since it’ll hold up where glass would just break. Thinking about using crayon/color pencils on this and then using that as carbon paper sort of to transfer the image on to the boards as base layer/underpainting for the encaustic panels, burnishing the back of the paper as it lays on the encaustic, etc. I tried testing a little today with a transfer bit on my wood burner but that didn’t work at all since the heat was too hot and caused the wax to actually melt in to the paper, so got to do this cool on cool, no heat applied. In theory it should work, somewhat. Still not sure if the encaustic and color pencil waxes will merge/melt together well but in theory they should I think. I think wax pencils have a parraffin type wax in them. If it doesn’t work well I may have to use crayons/wax pencils instead of the color pencils. Not sure I like that idea though since I want pigment in this and most crayons have way more wax than pigment. Color pencils are more leaning the other way a bit.

I made the light box since I think it’ll be easier process of photo to paint surface transfer that will work better than the crazy poke holes in pictures technique and pounce afterwards that I was planning on using. Still may use that sometimes, but it’s a really non-drawing type of thing so I’m not sure it suits my style/technique so well.

Goal is to do more art, do it in a way that suits me and gets things accomplished, and make time to live life a little too more than in the past. No more wasting time…

so… tentative schedule is…
Up at 4 AM. Do 3 pages of Morning Pages for The Artist’s Way/Journaling/diary type stuff… Then eat breakfast (probably a bowl of cereal, maybe fruit on occassion) In theory, that’ll take up til about 4:30 ish… maybe 4:40 or 4:20 sometimes?

4:30 AM – 5:00ish (maybe earlier depending on the above) do a 10-30 minute drawing… probably with ball point pen since it’s a speedy thing, but maybe other stuff like charcoal or color pencils sometimes?… maybe even graphite even though I hate the shine graphite produces. Number one reason I hate acrylic too unless lots of matte medium is used – also why I love oil paint and have decided on encaustic as painting medium of choice…

5:00 AM – 6:30ish = Work on 3d Modelling. I’ll probably do speed modeling for now… then go back and redo the fine details as needed later on. Maybe do a whole week of work without going back in to finish it up til the weekends?… I’ve been on Turbosquid for a very long time, so am at the level in there where you can get the keywords for free, so those keywords will be my subjects for these 3d models since that’s stuff that is known to sell, etc. I’ve been trying to copy/paste the keyword lists in to an open office file every morning, and will continue to do so and then will pick the subjects that interest me… I may sometimes stray from that and use my own ideas or keywords/topics, but there’s lots of ideas in there, so I think I’m going to focus on that a bit.

6:30 – Take a Shower, Make Lunch, Get ready for work, etc.

7:00ish – Head to work…

At work, walk with my Aunt on my morning and afternoon breaks (assuming I’m not on hold with blasted insurance companies when she takes a break)

11:00ish (my time for lunch varies) Eat Lunch and Read a page or two out of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain or The Artist’s way… Maybe other books on kindle, etc. Possibly do a 5 minute doodle session at lunch, but probably not as there’s not really much time since I only have half an hour lunch.

After work – Start up the Encaustic heating up as soon as I get home… Maybe draw for a few minutes while it’s heating up and the wax is melting. Paint after it’s hot with the encaustic til Tekla gets home.

When Tekla gets home, we’ll head to the Arc to workout. This is something I’ve neglected doing way too long, and is really why my sugar’s not under better control at the moment, even if it’s not too hugely bad yet.

After that we’ll have supper, and enjoy the rest of whatever is left of the night spending time with one another and enjoying our time together.

Go to bed around 10 or so since that’ll give me 6 hours of sleep. If I can get myself off of caffeine, I think 6 hours of sleep is enough… Going to be hard to do, especially at work since it’s free there and they have a huge thing there that keeps 3 pots going all day every day… they usually have one pot of decaf, one of regular, and one double strong – I usually try to mix half decaf with regular but half of the time the decaf is gone… need to drink water more, coffee less… very difficult to do, but I think if I can and can excercise more, this crazy schedule might work…

I like the creative versa tool (link above) because it does the same that the enkaustikos pens do with the temperature control, but for about 1/3 the costs, and a lot less on shipping since we only live a block away from Michaels.

(I will probably get the Encaustikos Flow Pen someday though since I’ve not seen anything else like it on the market yet… but maybe not since it costs so much if you add in the cost of the temperature regulator — why don’t they just add the regulator to the pens like Walnut Hollow did with the versa tool?)

(yours truly is working on it of course, so don’t have time to do a lot of drawing at the moment, but am reading Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain again, as well as the artists way at lunch, on breaks, etc., and also setting up my bedroom studio for doing encaustic painting – mixed up my first batch of encaustic mix suggested by John Dilsizian in Joanne Mattera’s book, The Art of Encaustic Painting, so look for more posts here in the near future last night – 50% beeswax, 25% paraffin and 25% microcrystalline – bought the beeswax at various state fairs and amish shops and farmer’s markets in the area over the last several years, the paraffin Gulf wax from various local grocery stores, and Microcrystalline from Swan’s Candles – http://www.swanscandles.com/ Amazing how 10 lbs of that stuff is 22 bucks there now, but 1 lb of darmar is 10.80 and it both does practically the same thing as far as encaustic painting goes!)

Media: Watercolor Pencil, Color Pencil & China Marker

I still don’t think this image image is ‘done’ but it’s getting close to where I want it to be. I’ve reworked it many times. I’ve been technically working on it about 2 or 3 months, but most of that time I was just looking at it. Since I started The Artists Way again this week I’ve been working on it an hour or two every morning and night, every day.

I have no idea how many real working hours have been put in to it, but there’s been a lot. I’ll put multiple layers in, erase them out, scatch out highlights with a burnisher, add more color, erase out some with an electric eraser, add more color areas, rework, etc. The gesso in the foreground has probably lost most of it’s tooth, as has most of the ‘water’ area to the left, but I keep adding new marks to it all the time, so I may have another few hundred hours of work to put in to it before all is said and done?… I’ll probably move on to some other artwork for now so I don’t really overwork it beyond a point that I can’t fix it any further. The scan was taken without any fixative added. I hate how shiny color pencil glare causes an image to really get a lot darker looking in the scan then it is in reality. The image is based on a couple of photos that I’m putting together in to one image in the drawing. I’m trying to be careful to leave some of the white of the underlying gesso. Most of the cloud area is almost pure white from the gesso with very little color pencil. I probably need to rework the middle ground and the ship in the background a lot more, but maybe not since some atmospheric perspective isn’t necessarily a bad thing here.

8/3/2011 Self Portrait #2 © August, 2011 Jeff Thomann

8/2/2011 Rose Study #2 © August, 2011 Jeff Thomann

Palm © June, 2011 Jeff Thomann

Palm 2 © June, 2011 Jeff Thomann

I also bought some wax paper to stack color pencil drawings that are not framed yet on. I don’t have many drawings yet, but plan on doing a lot more in the near future, and am fairly sure I won’t be framing all of them.

I’m probably going to use shoutcast on the roku for background music when drawing so that there’s not a lot of distractions. I love the roku. Best investment in a long time – and very nice alternative to expensive monthly cable bills. I learned about the colorless crayola from a podcast on color pencil drawings I watched a few days back. I love the roku for that sort of thing too, especially since the soundcard on the computer I usually use has been non-functional for over a year now.