Signature Prints - When the bad becomes the good

I have an abundant supply of old silicon mold sheets that I have made of random designs like chicken heads and the Breaking Bad head drawing of Walter White. These molds are often laying around and I am not a big "signer" of my work. Now I am placing them on the back side of the castings as a signature of sorts. These prints are looking better over time and now I realize I can just make the prints on the topside for rough outside work and not worry as much about the detail.

Big Cement Pour Testing Crack Resistant Cement - Variation of molds Single release molds

Many of my experiments require me to make a mold with the screen, then cast an original, then make a mold of that for production, which is later used for the brick making. I think that if I can just use the original mold for making the bricks it may save a lot of time and therefore a lot of money. There is also the possibility that the castings from the first mold will have higher detail than castings made from 3rd generation molds. The key is to make the mold reusable and not have to cut the mold from the frame. To make this work the casting material needs to shrink and not crack and cement always seems to shrink.

I make 5 pours with a variety of molds, 3 originals and a couple that were placed in frames, reused molds.

Variations of techniques that can be used once you have a Positive Relief Mold

This is where it gets very interesting. You can use a mold and make an object by pouring all sorts of materials into the coated frame relief.  Cement, plaster, Forton MG, silicon or epoxy are my most common materials. Each material can be used for different effects. If you go straight to cement then the frame is the mold and hopefully the cement will emerge without damaging the mold.

Whatever material you use the first casting will be the opposite, so if you printed a positive then a negative will be the result. With a relief it doesn't matter much unless there is lettering involved or you are concerned about the direction of the image in the final piece. I have taken to making a solid object of high detail with the first pour using a material called Forton MG. This is a melamine based plaster that creates a ceramic like finish, then I use that solid object as the original casting and make a silicon mold of that for production purposes. 

Push through an ink or solid material like acrylic paints

I typically use a squeegee and old screen printing inks and push them through the back side of the screen to seal the back and create a relief.

Once you have a desired height of material or ink then dry the ink using heat or leaving it somewhere to dry. Acrylic takes a long time to dry when applied this thick. I have used epoxy and polyester resins as well as thin cements, but you have to get the mixture really thick so that it does not run or bleed into the other parts of the graphic. Too much liquid ink will cause drip spots on the design because you are working with the graphic upside down.

I find that I like the dark areas of a graphic recessed and the highlights flat, so typically I make the raised areas the black areas. There are many variations and effects that you can get depending on which way you reverse the image and how you want to make the final molds and pieces. After the mold is dried and cooled I throughly spray the mold and frame with a mold release.

The process - Get a high contrast image and make a film to expose a screen

This won't be a complete lesson, just a series of blips that will show the highlights of making the photo-fresco / cement molds using screen printing. The first issue is getting an image and increasing the contrast using photoshop of some of program or method to make a film. The film is used to make a screen. The higher the contrast the less need there is for a halftone. A halftone is a series of dots that emulate shading in photos and is a typical method of making prints for reproduction. Here is a film of a Bruce Lee photo I found online.

The film is applied to a photo-sensitized screen and exposed to light. After the exposure the screen is washed out and porous areas are shown as clear spaces on the screen. These areas allow ink or other materials to be pushed through and work like a stencil for printing multiple pieces with the same graphic.

The screen should dry completely and the sunshine works great to continue to harden the emulsion. At this point you can use the screen for making a mold of the design.

Mortar here, Motar there

I tried some motar mixes and cheap cement with aggregate. The next test should be with the Crack resistent cement that has fibers mixed in. I used this stuff before and although it sticks to my mixer it may be a good cement instead of the ones with rocks in them which inhibits details. The crack resistant stuff may also have aggregate based on how chunky the bag felt. I am trying to stay away from stucco and motar mixes appear to set so slowly that I have broke more bricks than I have finished by moving them around before they are dry and strong enough to be tossed.

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.

It's been a long time since I bloged and rolled... lemme' get back, lemme' get back!

The only thing that is important here is new work. I've gone around and around with materials and products, but can never decide on the ultimate perfect item that can serve a purpose, be resistant to weathering and that people may want. I've built structures and frames, magnetic hats and Christmas tree ornaments, but nothing seems to stick for a long period of time. Metallic finishes are great, but I can get those out of the bottle or spray can, so I have had to abandon the cold casting methods that require sanding and oxidation in favor of spray on colors. One thing seems to be consistent and that is the need for more than one color in a final piece. This became apparent when I used some of my molds to make Breaking Bad Candy in the shape of the Heisenberg head, it looked good up close, but when I put a sticker behind the candy and the black on the sticker came through the translucent hard candy it made a big difference.

Mugshot wall of shame

Hollywood celebrity mugshot coffee mugs at yque.

New shoes on wire los Angeles designs

Yque front window

Satoshi Goes to the Mint; 1e-8 Bitcoin Value

The first generation of a duplicate product carries the most detail. In developing my mold making techniques based on screen printing I have eliminated the need for silicon to make my original molds, but my molds are not as durable and easy to use as silicone molds would be. I have rationalized the benefits of my on-the-fly molds by assuming that a first generation mold, even if it is not as durable, should provide more detail and a higher resolution product than a silicon mold that would force me to make a 2nd generation product. This logic seems undeniable, but I like the production characteristics of silicon that allow me to make many products with a wide range of materials without much damage to the mold.

My first project with these quickee molds was to make a Satoshi. What is a Satoshi you say? Well, a Satoshi is a unit of measure used in bitcoin to represent the smallest denomination that a bitcoin can be broken down to, which is One Hundred Millionith. This is very, very small, but eventually this measure may be as important as the penny was to allowing a dollar to be broken down to purchase candy back in the day. A Satoshi is named after the creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, and although he has tried to remain anonymous in his personal life, he did no such thing by naming the smallest measurement of Bitcoin after himself. Thus I have used this recently uncovered exposure of Satoshi himself to mint a coin with his face to be non other than a Satoshi itself.

This coin is made with epoxy and steel atomized powder with cold-casting methods in my experimental molds. The first batch of Satoshis were too small of a font, so I only made 8 of those. These will never get into circulation officially. My next batch had a larger font and is currently setting up. There are another 8 in that batch and if I use only my experimental molds then I can always produce them with the highest resolution possible with my techniques. By using steel powder I can keep the cost of production down to match the fact that a Satoshi isn't worth very much, if anything in any other measurable equivalent currency. Still I like the idea that making Satoshis may have been overlooked by the more opportunistic Bitcoin entrepreneurs.

I will sell Satoshis for the equivalent US dollar value of what a Satoshi is worth in the Bitcoin world, but the cost of shipping and handling will cover my cost of production in the long run since they won't even be worth a penny currently. One day a Satoshi may be worth a dollar or more, but the value of a Bitcoin will have to more far beyond where it is now to make that a reality; which may require the value of a single Bitcoin to be $100,000,000 US. Not likely. In the meantime you can own one of these for fun and be the proud owner of one of the smallest denominations of a digital currency that has ever existed.

3d printing at yque

In los Angeles

New store window

Halloween

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