by Steve | Apr 30, 2014 | Projects |
As I was paint this mural, I knew in the back of my mind that it was going to be tagged at some point. There has been a lot of tagging activity in the Coronado area lately and I was fairly sure that the taggers would see the murals being painted in the Oak Street Alley as stealing their thunder. I got the call on Monday that it happened and frankly, I surprised it took a whole month. They tagged my robots and murals by Carlos Rivas, Yai and a couple of others. I had some free time this morning so I took a trip downtown and repaired the damage. It took a couple of hours but it’s back to the pre-tagged sate. Let’s see how long it lasts.
Defaced
Repaired
by Steve | Jul 23, 2012 | Projects |
A few months ago I scored several of the small Peerless Bonus Packs at a going out of business sale. The small bonus pack has forty colors on 2″ X 2″ sheets. Normally, they’re in the $22.00 to $26.00 range but the because I’d been a frequent customer the owner ended up charging me $10.00 each. They’ve been sitting on my desk for a while and I’d been considering making a small coptic bound book out of one of them but after tinkering around I decided against it. I would have had to interleave each color with an acetate sheet and the whole affair would have ended up being too bulky.
Instead of a book, I ended up opting for Jane Davenport’s solution. I’ve seen various riffs on this theme and while I wanted to make one, I’m fairly lazy and I felt like measuring everything out would be a drag. I went the digital route and used Adobe Illustrator’s distribute function to line everything up. Once the template was done, I cut a piece of 300 gsm Fabriano Artistico down to letter size and ran it through my laser printer. The pallet is made from both the Peerless Bonus pack and the Peerless Complete Edition and I just cut the sheets up with a pair of scissors and applied them to the palette with some Tombow permeant adhesive. The only thing not pictured, is a piece of acetate that prevents the colors from rubbing together.
Want to make one of your own? Download the template by clicking on the link below:
Peerless Palette Template
by Steve | Oct 2, 2011 | Projects |
To wrap up construction of this project, I printed some instructions for the kit and applied them to the inside flap of the kit using a Xyron machine.
When I initially laid out the measurements for this project I started with the assumption that the paper inside of the kit was going to be 3″ x 5″. After putting the mock-up together I decided that I’d include a pen with the kit — after all what kind of an emergency kit would it be without a pen? To fit one into the kit, I extended the measurements of the outer shell by about 1/2″. The change provided some space for the pen on the side of the kit but because of the pen’s length I also had some extra space at the bottom of the kit.
I toyed around with fabricating a small paint palette out of polymer clay and while it fit into the kit nicely, the tolerances were too tight allowing only a couple of colors on the palette. I decided to fill the gap on the bottom of the kit with some Foamcore to provide structure for the kit but I still wanted to include a watercolor palette.
If you’ve ever ordered anything from Daniel Smith, you know that they frequently enclose a watercolor sample with your order. It’s usually their featured triad or new colors and they sample them out buy placing dots of the paint onto a card of watercolor paper. I decided to take a page from their playbook and make some micropalette for the kit that way. It’s not an ideal palette for color mixing, but hey… it’s for emergencies only.
by Steve | Sep 18, 2011 | Projects |
Back in January of 2008, I was sitting around shooting the breeze with Tracy Moore and he confided to me that he hadn’t documented some event because he didn’t have a journal with him at the time. It was one of the most shocking revelations I had ever heard; anyone who has known Tracy any length of time knows that he always has a journal with him. For a while, I though he actually might have had a secret pocket sewn into his underwear to store them in. I remember making a joke — something about needing an emergency journaling kit, I even drew it out in one of my journals later that day.
As I was thinking about what other things I might like to make to trade at JournalFest this year, I thought that a few of these kits might be fun and different. I started as I normally do by using a sheet of plain bond paper to work out the measurements. Once that was done, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the design I wanted and scaled the to the measurements I’d worked out. I printed the design out on a sheet of French Paper Company’s Pop-Tone card stock. These kits will eventually be filled with some paper so when I calculated the initial measurements, I made sure that they’d be about 3/8″ deep for the paper to fit into. I used a Scor-it board to score the card stock so that when it’s folded, it will be able to house the sheets of paper that will go inside. If you study the image below carefully, you should be able to just make out the scoring.
The next step was to trim out the areas that wouldn’t be part of the case once it was folded and after some experimentation with a couple of prototypes, it seemed like rounded corners would be a good ideal as well.
With the trimming completed, the next step was simply to fold each case on the scored lines to set the creases into the right position.
The case will be kept closed with a string and some paper buttons, similar to the ones you find on inter-office envelopes. After fabricating the buttons from some scrap I attached them using some standard grommets which pretty much wrapped up the exterior for this project.
Stay tuned. I’ll post part 2 as soon as I figure out exactly what I’m going to put inside.
