On the road to ruin, I found what I was looking for.

I progressed down my road to ruin, blaming the economy, growing old and of course, Obama. As the prices for everything I need continues to rise, along with my debt, I find fewer and fewer reasons to work on an enterprise that requires large overhead and expenses. Through these trying times I spend much of my time working on my experiments, or side projects and they have provided some inspiration, but not any sort of economic benefit. There were glimpses of effects and styles that I liked, but they have always been just a few feet out of reach. Then today I walked out and picked up a piece that I had left out to dry and it had the effect I had been looking for.

I have been making reliefs and one effect that I liked was the topside of the relief was a rusty light brown, like an iron oxide yellow, and the inside of the relief is black. The net effect is a naturally occurring two-color effect that I parallel to a photographic effect. The parallel is reached by understanding that in photography the black is created on a piece of white paper by exposing silver particles in a suspended emulsion to light and then rinsing the paper in a series of acids and water. The particles that are exposed turn black and the remaining unexposed particles are washed away in the process, thus leaving a microscopic black particle pattern on a white background of paper. The weak links here are that the image is on a thin layer of emulsion and that is on a piece of paper, which has a limited life under even the best of situations.

The idea of working with photo fresco techniques has been to create a more permanent photographic effect and although I can transfer a photographic image into plaster, much like original fresco paintings, the process is still only skin deep, albeit in a form of rock. The literal translation of a photograph into plaster could also be accomplished by pasting a piece of paper on a wall, so I lost interest in the final results of the direct photo process into gypsum based plasters and started experimenting with reliefs and epoxies.

I have been using a combination of screen printing methods and mold making skills to translate hi-contrast photographic designs into molds without using lasers or routers. In the end my molds are almost as good as silicon based molds, which I could also make from my original molds, which are sort of the negative in photography, or the master mold in a professional sense. I use them as working molds to keep my cost down since I can't afford to work with silicon or even urethane rubber these days. Plus the time it takes to wait for those rubbers to set always seems longer than it is. I can have a working mold in one to two hours using my techniques and at a fraction of the cost. This process also makes me feel like I am still using a photographic type of technique that provides more instantaneous results. I could move forward with this process in the future and make silicon duplicates or urethane rubber molds from the originals and do more of a production environment with the process and not have to worry about damaging the original mold, but I haven't worried about that for now, it's just there.

Once I have my mold making down, I started working and compatible with my casting materials I have been making small objects to see what type of relief I could make using hi-contrast images, like cartoon drawings, clip art, and some photos. I did a letter set for putting emblems on cars, but the weight of the material and instability of the materials caused them to lift off of the vehicles, eventually, so printing worked better for that project. I came back to small emblems of images that could be used as stickers, magnets or key chains, nothing fancy.

The big deal with making the relief effect was solved, but to make the rust effect I had to sand down the top surface and wait for the top surface to oxidize and turn yellow. My last big investment was a belt sander for sanding down wine bottles and making planters (another project), because the work of hand sanding is where I sort of stopped trying to get the oxidized effect. I finally used this sander to take off the top layer of some pieces I had made and then through them in some salt water to clean them off and speed up the oxidation process. I put them out to dry overnight, not expecting them to turn yellow, but it was worth the time of the wash and the cost of the salt. When I went out and gathered my emblems, they were yellowed perfectly in a way that created the photographic effect that I have been working on, but without a bunch of tiresome work from hand sanding.

I have also gotten a photographic effect by filling in the relief with a second color of epoxy, but that is the same as painting and a bit too much work for simple pieces. The idea that I can cast these other items in a cheap metal, buff them up with some sanding and wash them like a print in the darkroom is more entertaining and satisfying technically. This rust version of photo fresco casting adds the layer of feeling like the chemicals are doing the work and the microscopic particles are making the design effect from something that is beyond my stubby fingers ability to do.