Many ways to make a brick

There are many ways to make a brick, but one of the biggest decisions is which concrete or mortar to use. I have a bunch of plaster and hybrid gypsum products like Duracal and Tufstone. These materials set quick, but have a very low tolerance for water absorption and become chalky and fall apart. I like the detail I get from gypsum plaster products, but they will not last outside. For making the original castings I can use the gypsum plasters like Duracal and they look at lot like cement so they work well for samples.

The concrete stands alone - Superior Durability Beats All Else

I've been playing with the idea of outside stones, pavers, as they are known. The idea of a rock you can walk on is attractive to me as compared to the results I have had with printing on cement and then coating it with epoxy. The epoxy is too slippery and the acrylic paints are subject to discoloration due to weathering. The final conclusion is that a relief will proved a surface that will inhibit slipping while also providing a visual decoration.

To make these pavers interesting I have started to convert images using photoshop to large scale bitmap graphics that I can create a decent relief from. The question was how large of a bitmap halftone could I make and capture the detail with cement. The molds I started using are 13" by 16" which is not much larger than a 12" X 12" standard sized paver. To make the cement durable I have to cast it at approximately 1.5-2" thick. The cement I have been using proved that I could transfer some detail and these pavers may provide a photographic effect without have to coat the cement with a slippery or material that may not weather well.

Bear necessities - Canvas Print Shellac and Epoxy

What are the bare necessities of a piece of wall art? Typically a print picture or a painting on canvas or wood, placed in a frame for ornate and hanging purposes. I've been working with raw canvas the last few weeks making patches with prints on them and have framed a few of them. Instead of stretching the canvas I have been printing it flat and then coating the material with shellac and posting them on the wall. The shellac stiffens the canvas and gives it a vintage or aged look.

As usual, problems arise from the coatings of amber shellac as I have started to mount the canvas on wood and into plaster frames for hanging. The water based inks I have been using cause some curling of the canvas and make it difficult to bond with a flat exterior frame without pressing the canvas under a heavy object for some period of time after the shellac dries. I tested plastisol prints and coated it with
epoxy only to have the coating puddle and seep into the canvas causing a darkened print.

Tonight I took a variety of canvas prints and applied an interior clear shellac. My idea is that the clear shellac will not cause as much of a darkening and may provide enough of a coating on top of the canvas to keep the epoxy from seeping in as much and therefore result in a lighter print. The biggest issue now is if the shellac will respond like the epoxy and cause a puddle effect.

I took a sheet of patches that were printed with a plastisol ink, the same ink I use to print t-shirt designs for production. I expected the shellac to create rings on the plastisol like printing on a waxy surface, but it did not appear to do so on the first coat. Also the print appears to be lighter than if I used the amber colored shellac. I ran out of clear shellac before I could do a second coat, but will check the results tomorrow and see if the material remained flat, clear and had a consistent top surface before I apply a layer of epoxy.

The Cheese Stands Alone

If I could make cheese I would. I kinda look at the stuff I make as a consumable and like to have fresh work in the mix all the time. Here is an old post I did that shows how to make a steak, like I can cook anything else.  That creates a problem with old work as it piles up here and there. If I keep a piece long enough it may pass a certain amount of bonding time and then I think it is worth keeping forever, that is if it isn't too damaged. I keep moving this aluminum frame with epoxy and plaster around and have even kept the cracks and breaks intact and made a piece out of it that I like.

Photo Fresco Brick Wall with Spray Painted Robot Y-Que

Hollywood Wall of Shame - Celebrity Mugshot Decopauge Pavers

I did a batch of decopauge pavers last week with an epoxy layer then a screen print and put them in the blazing sun for a weekend. Needless to say there was a significant amount of yellowing. I can live with some yellowing, but in the end it is a flaw of science and materials that needs to be dealt with. There is one paver that did not yellow and that proves that it is possible to create a uv resistant decopauge for exterior use.

The image was of Caitlyn Jenner from the cover of Vogue and I have to assume that I made that coated cement piece with my UV resistant epoxy called Nuclear that I got from Douglas and Sturgess in Richmond California. This material is more fluid than the standard coating epoxy that I use and I have drifted away from using it for that purpose, but if it truly keeps these stones from yellowing I am going to go back and do some test. I have been putting a layer of glue and/or acrylic down on the washed cement squares before applying epoxy, which means this acrylic coating could also causer yellowing.  The first test will be to see if the acrylic coated stones will also yellow from below the epoxy coating.

Test: Apply a coating layer of the four materials that I am using on different pavers, then coat the stones with epoxy and allow them to sit in the direct sunlight for several days. After significant UV exposure to the bright Southern California sun check the pieces for yellowing. The coating layers keep the epoxy from sinking into the stone and therefore are good to conserve the more expensive epoxy materials. The four test pieces are furniture Modge Podge, a water-based acrylic with a satin finish. A water-based adhesive glue that dries clear. A standard acrylic medium that dries clear and direct epoxy as a base coating that also finishes clear but requires more coats if used alone.

Photo fresco - creating the gel

Epoxy and laminate.

Photo Fresco Revived - Don't call it a comeback

This site has never been a successful site for traffic or a consistent diary of my work on photo frescoes, but it is one of the few places I have put anything to text about my endeavor to make durable photos. Over the last month I have dug-in and pushed myself deeper into the chemicals that I use to make my photo fresco prints and found a few new combinations that seem to be working, consistently. Yesterday I set up a batch for the first time that included more than a few test pieces, a bakers dozen to be exact, and I am hopeful that all of them will come out successfully when I release them from the molds later today. It's not a comeback, but a revival of the process of Photo Fresco. The idea of a fresco is that the pigments from paints are absorbed into a wet plaster and is embedded into the hardening substrate. The result is a sort of merging of materials versus a paint on top of a substrate type of approach. The uses of fresco painting historically is greater than my knowledge, but the basic idea of absorption is what I am emulating with my efforts. Fancy gluing is what fresco painting really is, the binder is in the plaster and the absorption of the setting plaster pulls the pigments into a fixed state.

In my case I am using modified plasters, pigment based digital prints and epoxy hardeners to create something that I think is stronger than actual plaster frescos. Plaster itself is subject to deterioration due to moisture into the porous surface of the gypsum based materials. My process includes gypsum based plasters but not as the main binder. My main binder is epoxy, which bonds to the pigments that are printed onto film and then the epoxy is bonded to a plaster to stiffen and hold the epoxy. This could be called fancy gluing, but because each step is done in a wet state it is in this wet state that I feel like the bond is an emulation of the fresco process.

The durability of my fresco prints is coming from the idea that epoxy is my main binder with the pigments on the top surface. I have tried to avoid using a top coat of epoxy so that the pigments are directly facing outward from the print. This may not be a long term solution because some coating or protective layer may need to be put on top of the pigments to truly encapsulate the pigments and seal the image. Any layer on top of the pigments is going to provide a sheen or sense of lamination that I have been trying to avoid.

Until I due some weathering test there is no way to know just how strong my photo fresco prints are. The epoxy prints are potentially enough to call the process photo epoxy gels, epoxrescoes or something like that, but I enjoy using plaster or cement based materials to strengthen the back of the epoxy and can get a really good bond if I work with the materials when they are wet. This final step keeps me in the fresco game and provides a back layer that is strong and potentially durable to some basic weathering.

Another integral step in my process has been to re-use a bunch of screen printing frames that I have from my t-shirt printing business. This involves scraping ink, removing tape, washing on off the 16" X 19" frames and then coating them with a shellac for a somewhat dirt free surface to pour my chemicals in. I can't really put a value on my time, but it doesn't seem profitable to do this except that it is satisfying when I can take a piece of my old work trash and turn it into a new piece. I think I could do this process more effectively if I remove the old screens from the mix, but since this entire process was built around using these old frames it doesn't seem right to do so.