Masks and other Art

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm not unaware that aspiring artists looking for how-to information are a poor market for masks, knickknacks, candles, custom Barbies, and whatever else one or both of us makes and wants to sell - they might be a good audience for selling art supplies, not what we do, 'cause they're looking to make their own.  What they are is a source of hits prone to share the links on blogs and Facebook and specialty forums - and that stuff's golden for SEO.

I daresay I've proved I know what I'm doing with the free marketing stuff, witness what success this highly-specialized niche forum has had.  A fair percentage of what little posting CFC's Alpha Centauri sub sees contain links to resources we host.  Our crap Downloads section is numbers-game bait - maybe one person in 100 who visits signs up, and not a lot more than that of signups actually post worth mentioning - but Downloads is there to draw that .01%.

-I need to go say "JKStudio Facebook group" to Mylochka and see if anything happens...

[Buster's Uncle]

I did say it to her - now let's see...

---

Hey kids!  The knife and pseudo-plane/rasp I used on Uno's face!

Guess what I'm working on...

[Buster's Uncle]

Maybe half done: http://alphacentauri2.info/JKStudio/MakingAFaceBaseForMasks-JKStudio.html

---

She came through with the absolute minimum -I added the portrait, background, description, and only post so far- but she did come through...

https://www.facebook.com/JK-Studio-471093423266931/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel  -Kept me from getting more done with making The Captain.

Y'all do me a little favor and 'like' the page --- Elok done did ahead of you, and I heard me a rumor on them there innerwebs that he's a nerd.

Who else is a nerd for me?

[Buster's Uncle]

Well, another page done...
FunWithTakingAKnifeToUno'sFace.html

[Buster's Uncle]

...I'm going to have to do an -In The Workshop- subdirectory page sooner rather than later.  I'd sorta like to keep the two-column link sidebar up top no taller than the banner, and the links sorta big like that, which leaves me room for eight links, and it's pretty clear already that I'm going to have more pages of just -In The Workshop- sideshow/bait/tutorials than that.  Gonna keep cranking out pages first, though.

Next up is Johnny Depp as Cad Bane on the Planet of the Apes, or How my Niece stopped worrying and learned to love the skull. 

[Buster's Uncle]

I don't seem to have taken any pictures of how the skull mask appliance shell enclosure turned out, and find I need it for the page I'm currently grinding out, so here:

[Buster's Uncle]

Needed this for some material about my history with masks-

[Buster's Uncle]

We've had a little disaster.

 

Y'know, I always thought The Captain base ended up looking like The Brown Hornet from the last season of Fat Albert - but no one tried to paint him as African-American; that's MOLD.  I think that's as bad as it gets, but I collected what I could carry in sunset light so poor I wasn't sure there was any problem but dampness/spreading.  Now I'm astonished touching that didn't make me sick before I got up the hill to the kitchen door, and I'm not touching anything again to assess the damage until I go collect the rest tomorrow in daylight.

-I've been so frustrated/angry for so long about all the work I put in in November, turning them out like a machine to show some hustle for the gallery despite how long it took for everything to dry on the prep work before I could actually make anything, all for nothing thus far, because my collaborator has had time to knit enough to cover a football field, but paint nothing, not even the tiny Barbie masks I made in early June, until three weeks ago.

On one level, I'm in a stroke-inducing level near-psychotic episode of a rage - but really, I'm just weary and tired and depressed.  I've been so frustrated for so long about this - and make no mistake; if they'd been painted and gone to the gallery instead of abandoned for ten months in a backyard shack, this wouldn't have happened.  [fuddle-duddle].

[Buster's Uncle]

This is everything.  -There are some plaster figurines in the playhouse, but no sign of mold or crumbling, so I haven't evacuated yet, because triage.


-It's pretty obvious that God loves Uno's face, and wants him to smile; his unaltered -except I made him smile in the trimming- face is the only completely unpainted mask to display no settling deformation and no mold.  A lot of the half masks naturally wanted to rest on edge upright, and so weren't in a nested stack and got a lot of mold like The Captain, but no deformation.  The masks that had gotten a cursory primer coat are spotted and mostly substantially wider than I made them, the latter applying to the majority of the whole sat.  Only the old person face and the wrestling mask on the top row have distorted in a really damaging way.  Even they probably won't be hard to fix if the mold can be cleaned off so as to not interfere with (hypothetical) painting.



The other unscathed masks are the rest of the wrestling masks, based on Uno's face.  They were well along in painting, making the conclusion inescapable: not only does God love for Uno to smile -and, possibly, wrestle- He wants Mylochka to paint the &^%$#@! masks before I die of old age.



-Hey; the omens are right there in the pictures.

[Buster's Uncle]

-Y'know Uno, I realize you're already too wracked-up physically to actually wrestle, but for a number of obvious reasons, you'd make a brilliant manager - pair you with two jocks w/ good bodies and no mike skills who'd do as you told them about showmanship - and the magic would be world class even if your bodybuilders were barely competent performers in the ring.

-I cannot, BTW, recommend any aspect of, or role in, the wrestling business to anyone -even back when there was still any good wrestling around- to anyone in good conscience.

[Buster's Uncle]

It's slow on the webs this fine Labor Day like it's still Sunday -so I'm out of distractions- but I find my enthusiasm for grinding away on the art website is --- damp, flattened and covered with mold.

[Rusty Edge]

I understand.
Sort of like the time an in-law promised ( AGAIN ) to water my plants while I was away for a couple weeks. Once or twice was all I asked. Never happened. You know what did happen? A hot, dry wind. Lost the growing season and the effort I'd put into starting seeds late winter and early spring. I could be misremembering, because I find it easier to forgive when I intentionally forget. But the essentials are that they failed to do a simple thing they promised, and everything was wrecked as a result.

Suggestion, if you aren't able to salvage some of the masks. "Focus on what is left, not what is lost." has always served me well.
Rather than dispose of the ruined ones, could you practice finishing them yourself first? Neither I nor my two sisters will make pastry, because it pales in comparison to our mother's, so I understand if you don't want to paint them with a brush. But could you do anything else?  Spray them? Stencil?  Glue on something textured like sawdust, or colored sand, or cloth or fake fur or glitter or foil or feathers or dragon scales? Then throw them away because they are moldy.

If you found a way to finish masks yourself, you wouldn't be depending on Lucy to hold your hand egg for you. Independence is empowering. Well, that and you don't need this source of friction in your life.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh, the short-and-honest answer is that I'm not a hopeless painter, but I just don't want to.

I think if you've ever had a look at anything I've done in the way of Alpha Centauri art modding, my talent does extend to 2D art.  -For that matter, forum avatars; nobody gets to not notice I'm good at that.

I don't have a LOT of experience with a brush, but if I can learn to do nice stuff on the computer -awkward- I can gain the hand-eye coordination in analogue.  But I don't want to - I like collaborating.  I like Mylochka surprising me.


I just got called to go grill; company had delayed things.  More later.

[Buster's Uncle]

There's not much to add to that, save to mention that I've been talking about  working my way through my outrage that it was allowed to come to this - not least because my thoughts about how to fix it aren't that interesting.  Bring everything inside to get dry, spray to try to kill the mold, give it all at least a day to dry -probably spraying some more and slowing down the drying, but stuff like that makes my allergies crazy sick- try to brush the mold off when they're dry enough and get a better idea of the damage, etc., ect...  I do really think I can fix everything if the mold will come off enough to not mess up painting later.

Y'know; thinking about the immediate solutions first - and the outrage stuff is part of thinking about the larger problem, if I can keep it under control - which is actually going really well; there's been no shouting and swearing and no red face at all.  These are my babies and my pride -I thinks that's self-evident in this thread- and they have been sorely soiled by unforgivable neglect.  I'm supposed to be upset today.  It's okay in the end, if I'm not still balled up and not producing Friday.

I actually discovered this when I did because I'd been thinking about the larger problem - I went in there to grab up masks that were new models, which I see is at least half or more, because those should prove more appealing to paint to Mylochka.  It has to be freshly in this state, because I was in there within the last two months and would have noticed - and she was in there about three weeks ago to get the cat masks, and likewise would have noticed everything going spotty and/or full gray/green/brown/black.

[Buster's Uncle]

Ooh.  I actually got back to work on the Buster and the skull mask story for the webpage and needed this:


-See, I'd left out of tellings of this that on a previous visit, she'd spotted the above mask where it was propped on a dresser outside my office downstairs - and was naturally afraid of it - and had someone take her downstairs every day to see it from the bottom of the stairs, a distance of over 30 feet.  That's the spot I set the skull mask up at, and the way I introduced her to it.  Worked a hell of a lot faster than I'd expected -which was a visit a day to look from a distance while she worked up her courage thew rest of the Christmas visit- what with I've got that photo of her upstairs in Momma's sewing room wearing it 20 minutes later.

-Need to upload that one, too - the album's turning out very useful for the website, unless the JKStudio traffic grows faster than I expect - but then, that would tend to make me flush enough to upgrade our hosting package and pay for itself...