New Mayan calendar, same as the old Mayan calendar

Here are some cold casted emblems that I need to finish.

It's not easy being green

I've moved on from the Chicken Head as a result of the pressure to make something that can be practically used and sold. The Chicken Head photo fresco is a good piece, but the fact is that it is heavy and although it is durable, it is somewhat fragile. The size is also larger than life in that it is hard to ship and display a 10 lb 16" X 20" frame. Just the fact that if it fell on your head you would most definitely suffer a concussion. Therefore I have scaled down my work, again. I reworked a batch of designs and made a new mold with 2" X 3" pieces with a more detailed relief that is photographic. I was unable to buy the expensive silicon that I needed so I worked with my old school techniques to turn high contrast photoshop files into rectangular reliefs. Then I poured polyester resin with atomized metals to create a few batches of cold casted pieces, 18 at a time.

The piece shown here, Available for Filming, is from a t-shirt design that I sell at my store in Los Angeles and is a good example of the detail that I can get using these photo casting techniques. I poured this item using copper and buffed it up to show off the metallic gel coat. In some cases I dipped the piece in acid to speed up the patina process and although it works pretty well, I can't control how and where the piece turns green so I think I am going to stay with this sort of shiny metallic effect and let nature do the work of weathering over time. Here are a few more image of these rectangular small pieces that can be used as refrigerator magnets.

Chicken Head Released into the Wild

Back in the day I used to work at Flea Markets and although I may consider myself an artist of sorts, I've never been successful enough to be in a gallery or get any respect, besides printing t-shirts. I've always looked on my flea market days as The Beginning of my business career, even though it isn't glamorous. Still that's the way it happened and today I just can't bring myself to sit in the sun and sell stuff, even if I wanted to. Lately I've been buying and selling stuff on Craigslist and although it is a pain in the ass I kinda consider this a modern version of the flea market without having to sit in the sun. Today I launched an item for sale on Craigslist to bring my photo fresco pieces out from cold and into the sun with a Chicken Head Photo Fresco listing linked here: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/nby/art/3084344028.html I don't expect much, but I was very excited by the floor I made today using a bunch of my photo fresco pieces and just wanted to show how versatile these things are.

Balancing a load - Where and how to use brick panels

I have cast, coated and dried a batch of brick panels, but don't know how to use them. Originally I was just going to use these panels as backs for other pieces so that the frames I was making looked finished on both sides. Now that I have these pieces done I feel they may be a waste to use them on the back of other pieces that I have not yet made. The end result is a set of brick panels made from a variety of cements with depths ranging from 3/8" to 1/2". The brick patterns go in a vertical direction on half the panels and horizontal on the other half. The panels are 13" wide by 16" tall and are basically large flat cement tiles. I have coated the cement with two layers of polyester resin with atomized steel mixed in to help resist weathering.

The resin top coat would allow me to paint or bond other paint or coatings to the top and this seems to be the direction I am going with finishing the pieces. I have a couple of sets of stencils with mugshots and my thought is to coat an area with a light background color with spray paint or polyester resin and atomized aluminum to create a grey tone, then spray paint the stencil on top of the grey area. The problem with this is that I am wasting all the black area that I spent so much time finishing. The ease of painting the panels before mounting them should solve some of the problems associated with working on the panels when they are already made in the frames. I just feel it is a shame to cover them with a bunch of paint after doing all the work to make them black.

The frames themselves are not super strong and can crack if they were stepped or if they were dropped from a few feet off the ground. I do think they could be used as small table tops for outside use if I go back and mount them in the wooden screen printing frames. The reason for making these outside the frames is that all of the casting materials that I used, cement, gypsum plasters and hybrid plasters with acrylic and fibers mixed in. Still there is always a loosening of the material from the frame when I don't reinforce the pieces and anchor them to the frame while making them. I started using this as a technique with the cements and mortars since they shrink even more than the plasters and I have been using the frames as molds with the entire panel popping out after a couple of days.

I am hopeful that the cements are more resistant to weathering than the plasters, but still I went ahead and coated the cement panels with the polyester resin coating to see how that worked. I was hopeful that the coatings would provide a gel coat like strength to the fragile cement panels.

This may have worked but I can't really test the strength without placing a load on the panels. I placed an unfinished panel on the ground a stood on it and it cracked right away. The surface wasn't exactly smooth and I weight about 200 lbs, so it wasn't a fair fight. I do think these panels can hold 10 to 30 pounds no problem and if they were set in with a backing material then I don't see why they couldn't hold a larger load. Again, I don't have a reason for making them this strong, but I keep wanting to make these panels into something useful and if they can carry a decent load then they may be useful as a flooring or table top. As a wall or side panel or decoration they don't need the additional strength. If I put a lattice or thin rebar in the material when I cast it then I can increase the strength of the panels significantly, or at least when they crack the pieces would not separate as easily from each other.

I know that tile is not reinforced with a lattice and by setting it on top of strong materials that do not bend and filling the areas around the tiles with grout creates a water resistant base without have a reinforced tile itself. Any tile by itself would crack and break with even the slightest drop or hit with a hammer, yet tiles work great once they are installed, so I do not think it will be necessary to put a rebar lattice structure into the brick panels as long as I provide the proper backing and mounting surface and fill any voids so there is not movement below the pieces. Since tile is such a good material I can't help but wonder why people don't also use tiles on the outside of their houses? Wow, I did a search on this topic and of course there is much more to it than I imagined, but exterior tiles are a huge business, although it seems stone finishes like marble and rock are the most practical and elegant application for exterior tiles. Bonding is going to be important so my next step may be to create a mechanical and a chemical bonding method for attaching my brick tiles to an exterior wall so that I can sit around and watch them weather.

Exciting Developments in Cement and Urethane and Cell Phones

Exciting, not so much. Interesting, maybe. The facts are that the final stages of development of a product are not as exciting as the early stages of product development. I've been testing mixtures of cement, grout and mortar to find a nice balance for making thin panels that can be used as parts with filler to build reversible frames that can be used to build a wall. I know it sounds complex, but it's the best idea I've come up with that makes some sense to me. Ideally I want durability and cement seems to be the most resistant material that is cost effective and not sensitive to exposure to UV or rain. I've been coating the cement with thin layers of polyester resin mixed with atomized steel particles to create a rusted finish as it wears. The only variation I've got in the mix currently is mixing some atomized steel particles into a new water-based urethane that I was given a sample of. Result of these test will follow in the coming days, but my preliminary findings show that the urethane finish does not rust as quickly as the poly-resin with the steel. I have also been making some medallions out of bronze and steel mixed the same way and can't wait to see how they react to rapid aging caused by an acid wash. I have been working on promoting a cell phone service form a mobile phone provider called Ting. Today I got approval to provide customers that I refer to their network with a free t-shirt from my website YQue.com to encourage potential customers to complete a transaction. Since I don't have a use for the medallions, which are the inside face of the Sun God from the Mayan Calendar, I am thinking of making this item a free product too for people that sign up. The deal goes like this, If a potential customer clicks on my link shown here: https://ting.com/r/vtimr91 - Which includes a $50 off coupon for the purchase of a phone. If the potential customer completes a transaction for the Ting Mobile Phone that runs on the Sprint Network, then they can return to my webpage and get a t-shirt or medallion for free. The medallion would actually be an easier item to ship than the t-shirts. Here is a link to my webpage that describes the Ting Cell Phone service and the Free T-shirt deal.

Mayan Calendar Symbol Photo Relief

I gave away a cool cold casted item today, a mayan symbol from the famous Calendar to a kid. I hope he keeps it for a long time. I'll post a picture soon.

Resin coating cement panels - Cracks or Softness

The challenge I have been debating between epoxy and polyester resin goes on. I have been casting brick panels in cement with a variety of mortars, cements and grouts to get a surface that resembles brick and can fill the backside of some frames. I like the idea that the cement will resist the deteriorating effects of water more than the plaster gypsum products I have been using, but the cement has been slower to work with and is easy to damage while it is drying. I have gotten a set of 10 or so panels and felt they needed to be coated to resist weathering and to create a more finished looking piece. My product of choice has been epoxy, but the expense and time it takes for epoxy to set isn't desirable. Also the epoxy I have been using tends to get soft with heat and as a result it seems less desirable for outside conditions where I can't necessarily control the temperature. The bond of epoxy seems strong to wood anyway, but if it becomes soft then there is room for problems like keeping the shape that it may form into to if a piece is suspended in a random way. Then if there is rain or dirt it would puddle or build up in those sunken or raised areas, so the epoxy I am using is not the right choice for this application. Also I had some left over polyester bonding resin available to use. My biggest concern now is the adhesion to the cement. I wrote an review and commented on some of my issues here on Live Action News - The Salt of the Earth and at least feel some satisfaction in that the larger scale engineering technology of the concrete industry is dealing with some of the same problems, but on a much larger scale. Without reinforcing the panels I have gone on to apply a thin painted layer of polyester resin with some fillers and atomized steel particles to resist weathering and create a rusted finish. The polyester resin also feels thinner than the epoxy, so I am hopeful that it will seep in better than the epoxy would. Still over time there may be problems with cracking if the cement continues to shrink, after the polyester resin has set. The coating may absorb heat if I use the panels in the sun, because it is black, but the interior of cement should resist allowing the heat to pass through to the interior of the structure. This should be better than a solid epoxy or polyester object that could allow the heat to pass through. I suppose that I could just use a cement paint to cover the cement, or a specially designed epoxy paint like those used to do floors in car mechanic shops, but the resulting high gloss finish isn't my thing. I think the other problem here is that I like some visual weathering effects like rust, but don't like structural deteriorating effects like cracking and crumbling. Time will tell. Now I want to send these pieces through a gauntlet of test for weathering, like suspending one in salt water, coating one with acid, leaving another out in the sun, burying one in the dirt with worms and grubs, freezing one and burning one, just to see what happens. Burning may not be a good idea, but the other test for durability will work.