Art Share🎨

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/44165644

Welcome back to jellies!

A wonderful Lemmy user ordered this custom jellyfish several months ago. It's been a long time coming and he has been very gracious about it all which I am very thankful for.

It's made from hand pounded, recycled copper and local beach finds. It takes me about 40-50 hours in total to make one. This one is about 23 x 23 x 36 cm or 9 x 9 x 14 inches. They have been getting larger each go round as the originals were made for a 4" x 5" art show and sale. The next 3 will be even larger and are in process right now.

You can check out my profile for other copper artistic creations including the original 3 jellies I created in December/January for an art show and other fun stuff I like to create.

Zero

One of my acrylic paintings from 2020.

Digital, Zen Japanese sumi-e style

Text reads, "Others are others, I am myself." (Hito wa hito, onore wa onore)

I dunno, drawing this made me laugh though.

Needed a break from all the realism, so I stretched this. No idea why he's wearing a tux and boxers, he just is.

This is my favorite summer time art - along with tie dye. It’s super easy, and it’s both an art in itself and a way to get materials.

You’ll just need an immersion blender and some sort of screen. I guess a regular blender or food processor would work, but would be a pain in the butt to clean. The pulp often sticks to stuff like glue, so be careful about mess.

Then just find junk paper - almost anything will do (if you use junk mail - rip out the plastic screens). Lots of the ink will dissolve off, if you want any color in your final product, you’ll need a water fast dye like food coloring.

Rip up the paper, soak it in some container with water for fifteenish minutes. Blend it until it’s pretty goopy (some unblended portions can contribute to the aesthetic - but you do need most of it pulverized to stick together).

Then, put your mesh/screen on some sort of surface. You can buy ones made for this purpose, but it’s easy to find cheap alternatives. Dollar Tree, Walmart, lots of budget stores should have plastic needlepoint canvases, and you can place this on some sort of plastic to try to press as much of the water out as you can. If you have another screen and a weight you can use that to press down evenly, you can push it down with your fingers and leave patterns in the paper itself… just try to get as much of it out as you can, it’ll dry quicker that way.

Then, leave it outside for a day or so. Once it’s dry, it should be easy to wiggle loose of the canvas. You can encourage it if it’s still a little damp by placing it in the oven on the lowest setting for a bit. You can flatten it under stacks of heavy books or other objects.

It’s a cheap alternative to canvas/buying acrylic paper - especially if you make thicker blocks. It does not take marker or watercolor well - no bleed through, just doesn’t react well.

It’s fun if you like texture though.

It took me a lot longer than I expected to get this print out. In theory it was really straightforward, take my turtle image and feed it through similar code as what I used to make the jellyfish, but... I recently added a MOSFET into my print system so that I can control the anodizing current by pulsing that (instead of print speed/voltage), but it led to a ton of EMI issues messing with communication with the motor controller. After changing my grounding paths many times and receiving a few fun 200V shocks I just re-wrote my controller code to be more fault tolerant, and that seems to have done the trick!

A study of light - Oil painting