I spent my day watching steel rust and loved it.

I did a print on wood with epoxy to make this steel rust for the background of a spray paint stencil design. The idea is to have the flesh and light tones made by the rusting steel pigments in the mixture. I increased the highlights too much with photoshop and this image appears yellow, but it basically shows what I have in terms of this process. I'm happy with the effect and I proceeded to make three more of these on canvas in a relatively short period of time. I am literally making these backgrounds and adding a saline solution and putting them out to dry, which means I am standing around watching them rust.

Mounting the frame and finishing the piece is still the hard part. I prefer not to have to spend my time worrying about how the final piece is going to look, but I am forced to work in a retail world and this requires me to have to make things presentable. The framing is more important than any signature, but I don't worry so much about that any more. Proliferation is more important than identity in my world, but uniqueness is a signature in and of itself.

I need to go back and work on some new stencils or I may even be able to screen print on these canvas's. These are not reliefs as I have regressed back to a 2-d concept. The benefits of a relief is a limiting factor for practical applications since reliefs cannot be applied to a wide range of products. Reliefs are basically emblems and if an image has depth within the graphic itself, then it can serve the same purpose as a sculpture without having the thickness and weight that comes along with a relief. I learned this early in my career with craft-like products when I tried to add embroidery to my screen printing business. People / Customers preferred screen printing over embroidery because of the graphic effect versus the more labor intensive embroidery process. It's like cartoons are better than photographs in some ways. Your imagination can flow into and out of a cartoon, but a photo brings you back into reality and it's not that fun; it's literally too real.