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| Nearly full |
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| Empty |
Wood nook: empty and (nearly) full.One more layer to go here, and then I move on to the next firewood stacking space.
There is so much wood left to stack. And the day is set to be very hot and sunny. Woe is me.
This load of wood is very green and wet, which I wouldn't mind at this time of year since it will have six months or so to dry out, but I didn't pay for green wood. I shall have to see if some accommodation can be made.
Once again, this is stained pine, but this time it's untreated timber, so it could conceivably be used for food. The rippled surface would make eating from it inconvenient though.
This is turned from an offcut of a treated pine fence post, which explains its horrible knottiness. Stained with Feast-Watson walnut spirit stain, my favourite, and polished with my own home-made paste wax.
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It's designed to be sturdy rather than delicate, as the last (oak) one got busted in the violent hurley-burley of office life.
This one is just scrap pine, stained and waxed, and I think it doesn't look too shabby. It's about 170mm tall.
These two little platters were turned from off-cuts of a laminated bamboo cutting board that I had cut down to a more manageable size. They're about 120mm in diameter, and 20mm thick.
Bamboo works very nicely, and it takes a good finish too. These have both just been sanded to 240 grit with no other finish applied, and they've come up to a nice smooth satin polish.
It's demolition timber, and probably a floor or ceiling joist, so possibly rimu but more likely, around here, black maire.
It's 70mm tall.
So I got a sapele off-cut out of the rubbish pile, cut it up and whacked it on the lathe.
It's in four bits: the top and bottom discs, the pillar, and the finial, all glued together.
I ran the brayer down the edges of the plate just to give the image a visual boundary.
This is a process that is used a lot in macro photography, as the focal plane tends to be very shallow, both because the lens is very close to the subject, and also to keep exposures manageable.
The way it works is by taking several photos, with the focus set to a different point on the subject for each one.
Affinity Photo automates the process almost entirely. It's not exactly idiot-proof, but it's pretty easy. And it also provides tools for fixing errors that may arise due to subject movement or what-not.
This is a plastic Reaper Remorrhaz, photographed with a Canon EOS 50D and 28-135mm macro lens.
Below are the three source images I used, focused on the front, middle and back of the model. To the right is the image combined in Affinity Photo.
Acrylics on pre-stretched canvas .
Stuff I Made Today: a conical ebonized oak bowl. It's about 180mm in diameter and 80mm tall. It sits on a fairly small foot, but there's a fair mass of oak down low in the base so it should be reasonably stable.
This little oak pot is about 100mm in diameter, and about 70mm tall.
Only barely visible in this photo, the bit of oak is just beginning to spalt — it's more visible under the base.
I did this years ago, 2006, in crappy hard crumbly old brown lino.
I thought that was all that lino was, and couldn't understand why people seemed to like working with it. I thought it was horrible stuff. These days I use grey marmoleum, and it's a thousand times better.
Image are is about 150mm square. Printed in black oil-based ink, brand unknown, on newsprint.
When i had got as far as outlining the numerals, I realised that I'd forgotten to reverse them on the block, so they'd print back to front.
I said some Bad Words, and tossed the block aside.
A couple of days ago, I found that block again and thought that since it was already mounted and prepared I might as well use it to some purpose, so I started doodling away at it with various shapes and textures, just for a spot of carving practice really.
Today I printed it.
The paper is nothing special, just sheets ripped off an A5 cartridge paper sketch block. The ink is Flint water-based black.
This knife block is growing and growing, but I'm running out of places I can add any more racks. There's a faint possibility that we might have more knives than we strictly need. Ridiculous idea, I know.
The bakelite (or whatever it was) handle for the door of our log burner underwent spontaneous disintegration, so I whipped up a new one from a bit of oak. It took about ten minutes or so.
The steel of the handle gets hot, but I don't think it will get hot enough to scorch the oak. I'll keep an eye on it.
I think it looks a lot nicer than the old one, and it certainly feels nicer.
I ebonized it with ferric acetate, and it really shows the difference in tannin levels between the sap and heart wood. The heart goes really dark, while the sap is affected to a much lower degree.
Here's another bread-&-butter knife sharpening and handle replacement, this time with a bit of deer antler. The natural curve of the antler is very comfortable in the hand, and it polishes up very nicely with a clean buffing wheel and fine polishing soap.
The casein handles on these old dinner knives tends to go kind of crappy over the years, especially if, like me, you don't take good care of them and submerge them in hot water repeatedly.
However, the steel is good -- flexible, and holds an edge -- and it's worth the short time it takes to give them new handles. Also, with a little attention from grinder and diamond paddles, they make really good paring knives.
If you are a business, and you want a piece of art work for some commercial purpose, it is tempting to stage a competition. It looks like a good way to get to choose the best of a wide range of offerings, while paying peanuts.
What it is in reality is a cynical exploitation of emerging artists' desire for publication.
You're asking a whole lot of people to do a whole lot of unpaid work in the hope that you might reward them with a handful of beans and the publication of their work somewhere.
How about you actually put in a bit of work yourself, do some research, find artists whose work resonates with you, and actually commission them to do the job? There are a multitude of sites on the internet that are ideal for seeing a huge range of talents to choose from. It would be more honest, and less exploitative, to source your commercial artwork that way.
You might retort: Well, what about the EXPOSURE?
To which I reply with a hollow laugh.
The only shot-glasses I could get locally are double-shots, and it's really a bit tall. A single-shot (30ml) glass would be better. I'll keep an eye out for one on my travels.
It could do with a cap of some sort to help stop the ink evaporating and thickening, but for the moment it will be a use-it-and-wash-it thing.
I did find some 30ml shot glasses, so I modified the wooden carrier to fit one.
The notch out of the rim is just there to tidy up a chip that broke out when I was thinning it down enough to fit the new glass.
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| Blender screenshots |
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| Antique inkwell with its new reservoir in place |
I have an excellent nickel inkwell from the '30s, with a sprung domed lid that slides out of the way when opened.
Regrettably, its original reservoir was made of bakelite, and over the years it had got cracked.
I did briefly use an aluminium insert made from an old case for some fairly fancy fountain pen cartridges, and that worked just fine, but in the end I decided to design and print a brand new reservoir for it.
I had to print it in resin, as FDM isn't reliably watertight, and also it seems to disintegrate when in extended contact with indian ink. Hopefully the resin will fare better.
Way back in the distant past (2011), I made this chessboard table. In a failure of foresight, when I attached the top to the carcase, I glued it as well as screwing it to battens. That was a mistake.
The table is too low to be comfortably usable, so it would be better if the chessboard was detachable, to be used sitting at a table.
So today, at long last, I achieved that by the judicious application of brute force. The damage is all underneath, where it doesn't show, so that's good.
Next step is to formulate some method of attaching it to the carcase in such a way that I don't have to unload it all and turn it upside down to unscrew it (and replace it). I think I have a plan.
I've added a collar moulding in sapele around the bottom of the chess board. It fits snugly against the carcase and holds it firmly in position, but can be taken off at whim. If I ever have to have it more firmly anchored, I could put a couple of screws through the moulding into the carcase, but I doubt very much that will ever be necessary.
The moulding also acts as a foot for the board to sit on when it's off its carcase.
I've become very lax about drawing, not least because I tend to waste my life away these days on the goddam internet instead of doing anything productive.
I really need to take myself in hand and get back to drawing every day, even if it's just nonsense like this.
These two guys I drew in Indian ink, using a couple of dip pens.
My hands are not as steady as they once were, but I'm sure that a bit of practice will help with that — or at least let me figure out how to work around it.
Here's another box I made, another presentation piece for somebody who's leaving a job for pastures new.
The lid has two sets of magnets as a latch — they're strong enough that I can pick up the whole box by the lid and not have it fly open, but not so strong that I have to struggle to get the lid open.
The walnut is all out of one board, about five feet (1.5m) long. There's a considerable difference in colour from one end of the board to the other, which I found a bit odd.
The jar itself is a big plastic peanut butter jar.
The black thing was designed in Blender and printed on my Ender 3. It has an inset ring in it that I've squished a bit of closed-cell foam into, and the foam has a hole cut into it that the head of the airbrush pushes into. It creates something of a seal around the airbrush head to minimize spray leakage.
I cut a matching hole in the lid of the jar and hot-glued the nozzle-sphincter to it, and drilled some little holes on the other side of the lid from it to release pressure while allowing a minimum of the spray to escape.
I can just load up the dirty airbrush with a solvent, jam it into the foam sphincter, and spray it through until it's clean. And there isn't a great cloud of aerosol solvent floating around my workroom.
Eventually, I'll have to empty it, but it will do quite a few rounds of cleaning before then.
The paper is nothing special; just 110gsm cartridge. The ink is Flint water-based black.
I didn't remember until I'd already started cutting that I hadn't finished flattening and sanding the lino, so there's some speckling apparent in the solid blacks. Ah well, I'm sure it won't be the last time I make that mistake.
Am I happy with it? Well, I'm never 100% satisfied with anything I make, but I will go this far: I've done worse, could be better.
It's taken from a graphite drawing I did years ago, which in turn was taken from a photograph from Machu Picchu.
I don't absolutely hate it, but it's far from completely satisfactory. I could keep tinkering with it, but I doubt that I'd end up making it any better. And besides, I'm heartily sick of it now.
The image size is about A5. It's printed on Bunkoshi Select washi in Flint water-based black ink.
This is the wood-turning equivalent of doodling, just doing whatever with whichever bits of wood are to hand with no plan or intention.
Top to bottom: kauri, rimu, oak.
The oak platter is about 210mm in diameter, which isn't far off the largest size my little lathe will handle.
I agree in principle, but the thing is that for the money men in the commercial art world, the art is just a commodity, like everything else. And artists are just peons, to be paid as little as possible, and to be replaced by robots if at all possible. The thought of being able to produce advertising graphics and illustrations without having to deal with troublesome human artists is a pure joy to them, not to mention the cost savings that allow them to keep more money instead of spreading it around.
For that reason alone, the intrusion of AI into the world of graphic art is only going to increase, and I don't see that there's anything that human artists are going to be able to do about it.
Merry Xmas.
