.The Bowels of Discontent.
The bug finally bit me, I love to shop online. When my student aid came in, I become a proponent of therapy shopping. Maybe it is the political climate or stress from school, but here's a list of all the whacky stuff I bought:
1.) Gel Facial Mask that can be microwaved or frozen
2.) Egyptian Chamomile tea
3.) Self Acu-pressure Massage cane
4.) Chin up bar
5.) Wi-fi Repeater
6.) Airbrush needle
7.) Airbrush nozzel
8.) 4030 Inter-coat airbrush medium for Createx H20 dye-based candy paint
9.) The book Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus
REVIEWS:
1.) The Gel Mask felt firm on my face. The frozen gel was so cold I almost had to take it off my face. My skin felt noticeably tighter and I saw an improvement in the tone of my skin. I only microwaved it a few times, and I felt that it was only good for relieving facial tension after a long emotional day.
2.) The Egyptian Chamomile was sedating, and I meant to make it my bedtime ritual. The tea is comprised of the entire fruiting Chamomile blossom, and it smells very fragrant. It is said that Egyptian priests would drink Chamomile tea to channel the gods. The tea is sweet with a bitter aftertaste, and in time you feel a very subtle warm glowing sensation that eventually overwhelms you until sleep rescues you from your waking hell.
3.) I may have already told you about the massage cane, because I can't stop talking about the benefits of self-accu-pressure. Instead of having someone touch you, you can press this bowed piece of cast plastic into all your sore and aching nooks. It has a hook and several nodules that seem to reach every muscle on the body. I really worked out a bad knot in my back, and all by myself.
4.) I think chin ups are hard. I can only do three. After pumping barbells for a few weeks I thought I was going to do more than three. That really dissuaded me from using my chin up bar a lot, and then I got that knot in my back that I was talking about in product review #3. Since I screwed it permanently into the wall, I may wind up coming around to it at a later date.
5.) I had an issue with my wifi radius being interrupted in my bedroom. Eventually the signal became so weak, I couldn't track it at all. I live in a very old house and there may be a large amount of lead in the walls stopping the signal, or my bedroom is a FARADAY CAGE. Anyways, the wifi repeater is the size of a nightlight and I have it plugged into an outlet that is halfway between my bedroom and the living room where the router is. The wifi repeater strengthens my wifi signal to full bars. I felt this product was a great value, and did what it said it would.
6.) I bought a new needle for my mural, because my old one had a minor barb on the tip. It wasn't perfectly straight and that can affect the shape of the spray pattern. I read about how you can flatten out a bent needle between two blocks of pine, but I'm an airbrush artist not a carpenter. I do have to say the needle came poorly packaged from Amazon's warehouse. It was probably packed by a robot, because the needle was loosened from it's protective cap and was freely bouncing around in the blister pack. Luckily, the needle didn't get messed up, but I was pretty alarmed to see this quality of service. The needle is a very fragile micro-machined part that must be handled with great care. Next time, I might order the part from the distributor.
7.) After snapping my last nozzle off in my airbrush, I knew to screw this on very very carefully. I learned that you just want to use your fingers to screw the nozzle on, the airbrush only comes with a wrench to unscrew it as the nozzle may become tighter with use. It was a costly mistake, a nozzle isn't cheap, but there have been many lessons taught to me by this amazing medium.
8.) The inter-coat paint is a clear mixture that is supposed to mock the effects of a 2-part epoxy so that I can thin it down and spray it through the airbrush. Upon closer inspection, the dye-based paint is very liquid and must become more viscous for ideal adhesion. So I whip the paint up together with the inter-coat, and spray this over a silver aluminum underpainting. It's going to be trippy.
9.) I bought this book as an engagement present for one of my oldest and dearest friends. While I have never read the book, I assume it is good since it was once a NY Times best-seller. I am coming to terms with the fact that I used Amazon to send a joke gift book.
Writing all this out made me feel bad. It makes me feel like a first world capitalist lunatic. Most of this stuff was complete junk! My dog chewed up the facial mask because I forgot to give her water one day, and she wanted to drink the gel. There were microtherm-beads everywhere. I stopped drinking Chamomile tea, it wasn't strong enough most of the time. I lost the massage cane for a long time. It was under my couch, but now that I have it again I may come to appreciate it more than I do right now. I explained that I don't do chin ups because I am embarrassed by my weakness. The wifi repeater was worth it. The airbrush gear I realize was a manic purchase. I could have fixed by airbrush needle, and I would never have snapped my nozzle of if I took my time to do it right. I really have no idea how the inter-coat candy paint thing is going to go. It's such an experiment I'm beginning to doubt using it in the background of my mural. What if it doesn't come out the way I hope? I would just die. In my fantasy, the deep purple paint would look almost glittering and holographic. And then I fear it may look flat and uneven, and overly dark. Behind the two birds there is going to be a large circle in the background. It will resemble a rising sun or that circular fill they put behind tattoos commonly referred to as a "shine." My big idea is to paint this candy purple, but if not there are other treatments I have in mind. If not candy paint, then I could imagine the circle being red because rising suns and shines are usually red, so I just see red. Another idea is to paint it sky blue with this hyper-realistic cloud technique you can make with shredded cardboard. I have also imagined color bombing it with every color I have like a tye dye overspray bouncy ball jawbreaker. I might do a test spray when I get to the restaurant tomorrow, and I'll show you my results. I may find a 3D object to test paint, and take it beneath various lights. I would also like to test some clear coat that I have recently obtained. I obtained one jar of gloss, and one jar of matte. I plan to mix them together to make a semi-gloss. It is my belief that 100% gloss would look bad in a dimly lit taco restaurant, the orange interior light will obscure too much of the image in a bad way. While I am hoping that a thinned out combination of both gloss and matte will give a distracting varnish to obscure my poor form and lack of imagination. Looking back on the fighting cocks, when I was told I could paint anything I wanted I should have done two things:
1.) Don't use a line drawing with so many lines, even though it instantaneously makes your art look more time-consuming, hence more virtuous. Virtue is something that is universally appreciated, so the longer your process the better artist you are. If you are a very careful person, you are a respectable person. Maybe there are pros and cons to this, but when I'm working on it I say, "Next time I do anything on a big wall, it's going to be simplified so I can do it over a weekend, not some bullshit masterpiece that I overwork until I upset myself. I need to find a large space where I can really cut loose with the airbrush. I have felt restricted in my laundry room studio, and especially by the time frame set by the business owner. Two weeks until the piece is DUE. This whole prospect is making me want to throw up. I think I painted it for selfish reasons. At first, I felt egotistical since I was invited to do it, then I realized I painted it to be a certain way and that was gross to me. So then I stopped painting all together because the mural is supposed to be fun and I have had an awful time figuring out some of the finer points about airbrushing that they don't talk about in the books and forums. I've seen master airbrushes in person, and I know I am missing whatever it is that will take me to the next step. I don't think it's going to be expensive gadgets that make me a pro. It's going to take practice. Rome was not built in a day, so I should be a little bit kinder to myself about my level of skill. If the candy paint doesn't work or if the semi-gloss coat fogs, I may never pick up an airbrush ever again.
2.) Don't over-thin your paints when painting on a wall. The paint will drip, and not contain enough pigment to apply controlled coverage. I had some nasty dripping going on, and had to jump on a bar stool with an undershirt that was to big for me. I wiped up the paint before it dried, and it showed through subsequent layers, which I thought might closely replicate the random colors of a feather. Green is an interesting translucent color, because it really tended to go from light to extremely dark in only a few passes. Maybe it was my paint mixture, I believe the Testor's green I was using is already thinned down with alcohol or some other solvent. So I double thinned this paint and it was the consistency of watercolor. I bet it would show up on a cotton shirt, but it was far too wet to use on the paint sealed wall. I need viscosity for it to cling and self-level evenly. I really think it worked out for the best in the end, I was whipping in the directions of the feathers for realism, and I started acting like a rooster while painting it, to really capture an energy in the wall. People are going to see this but not really see it. It will be a background painting that is unobtrusive to their dining experience, but brings a certain authenticity that the establishment had been missing. This attempt at mural art is my first professional endeavor. I have done murals in the past, but for never more than the cost of my materials. But now I am older, and I probably could have named a higher price, but I would do it for $100 in tacos because trade in kind is the most agreeable of transactions. We will give each other which we already freely have, and also that I will not take all what is owed until a date that is later than now! I realize now that after buying all that airbrush gear: sever jars of paint and additive, a bunch of xeroxes I didn't use but felt compelled to make, and SHARPIE PAINT MARKERS; I realize I have spent more than $100 easily. I will have tons of paint left over, so it's hard to say what is the piece actually worth? What is a painting worth to a friend if you enjoyed doing it? How can you put a price tag on that? It's an honor to be selected to do the job. They knew other people who could paint something else differently, and they have been very supportive the entire time. I hope all their compliments aren't just ways to encourage me to hurry up and get out of their way as the rest of the dining area is completed. I have been painting this mural since the room looked like a construction zone. I have come in weekly for nearly 2 months, and now they want me to finish what I've started in just 14 days. I really don't appreciate greater demands being placed on me when I'm doing them the biggest favor of their life. Two other murals that are painted in the patio area are atrocious. They rub off on my when I walk past them and the ugly gets pushed into my picture. This picture on the wall will never be the picture in my mind, and maybe there's an important life lesson I can extract from all of this. When you make a painting, it makes you too, and you get what you get just like in life. Life is full of wild mysteries beyond the comprehension of the greatest minds that have ever lived.
1.) Gel Facial Mask that can be microwaved or frozen
2.) Egyptian Chamomile tea
3.) Self Acu-pressure Massage cane
4.) Chin up bar
5.) Wi-fi Repeater
6.) Airbrush needle
7.) Airbrush nozzel
8.) 4030 Inter-coat airbrush medium for Createx H20 dye-based candy paint
9.) The book Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus
REVIEWS:
1.) The Gel Mask felt firm on my face. The frozen gel was so cold I almost had to take it off my face. My skin felt noticeably tighter and I saw an improvement in the tone of my skin. I only microwaved it a few times, and I felt that it was only good for relieving facial tension after a long emotional day.
2.) The Egyptian Chamomile was sedating, and I meant to make it my bedtime ritual. The tea is comprised of the entire fruiting Chamomile blossom, and it smells very fragrant. It is said that Egyptian priests would drink Chamomile tea to channel the gods. The tea is sweet with a bitter aftertaste, and in time you feel a very subtle warm glowing sensation that eventually overwhelms you until sleep rescues you from your waking hell.
3.) I may have already told you about the massage cane, because I can't stop talking about the benefits of self-accu-pressure. Instead of having someone touch you, you can press this bowed piece of cast plastic into all your sore and aching nooks. It has a hook and several nodules that seem to reach every muscle on the body. I really worked out a bad knot in my back, and all by myself.
4.) I think chin ups are hard. I can only do three. After pumping barbells for a few weeks I thought I was going to do more than three. That really dissuaded me from using my chin up bar a lot, and then I got that knot in my back that I was talking about in product review #3. Since I screwed it permanently into the wall, I may wind up coming around to it at a later date.
5.) I had an issue with my wifi radius being interrupted in my bedroom. Eventually the signal became so weak, I couldn't track it at all. I live in a very old house and there may be a large amount of lead in the walls stopping the signal, or my bedroom is a FARADAY CAGE. Anyways, the wifi repeater is the size of a nightlight and I have it plugged into an outlet that is halfway between my bedroom and the living room where the router is. The wifi repeater strengthens my wifi signal to full bars. I felt this product was a great value, and did what it said it would.
6.) I bought a new needle for my mural, because my old one had a minor barb on the tip. It wasn't perfectly straight and that can affect the shape of the spray pattern. I read about how you can flatten out a bent needle between two blocks of pine, but I'm an airbrush artist not a carpenter. I do have to say the needle came poorly packaged from Amazon's warehouse. It was probably packed by a robot, because the needle was loosened from it's protective cap and was freely bouncing around in the blister pack. Luckily, the needle didn't get messed up, but I was pretty alarmed to see this quality of service. The needle is a very fragile micro-machined part that must be handled with great care. Next time, I might order the part from the distributor.
7.) After snapping my last nozzle off in my airbrush, I knew to screw this on very very carefully. I learned that you just want to use your fingers to screw the nozzle on, the airbrush only comes with a wrench to unscrew it as the nozzle may become tighter with use. It was a costly mistake, a nozzle isn't cheap, but there have been many lessons taught to me by this amazing medium.
8.) The inter-coat paint is a clear mixture that is supposed to mock the effects of a 2-part epoxy so that I can thin it down and spray it through the airbrush. Upon closer inspection, the dye-based paint is very liquid and must become more viscous for ideal adhesion. So I whip the paint up together with the inter-coat, and spray this over a silver aluminum underpainting. It's going to be trippy.
9.) I bought this book as an engagement present for one of my oldest and dearest friends. While I have never read the book, I assume it is good since it was once a NY Times best-seller. I am coming to terms with the fact that I used Amazon to send a joke gift book.
Writing all this out made me feel bad. It makes me feel like a first world capitalist lunatic. Most of this stuff was complete junk! My dog chewed up the facial mask because I forgot to give her water one day, and she wanted to drink the gel. There were microtherm-beads everywhere. I stopped drinking Chamomile tea, it wasn't strong enough most of the time. I lost the massage cane for a long time. It was under my couch, but now that I have it again I may come to appreciate it more than I do right now. I explained that I don't do chin ups because I am embarrassed by my weakness. The wifi repeater was worth it. The airbrush gear I realize was a manic purchase. I could have fixed by airbrush needle, and I would never have snapped my nozzle of if I took my time to do it right. I really have no idea how the inter-coat candy paint thing is going to go. It's such an experiment I'm beginning to doubt using it in the background of my mural. What if it doesn't come out the way I hope? I would just die. In my fantasy, the deep purple paint would look almost glittering and holographic. And then I fear it may look flat and uneven, and overly dark. Behind the two birds there is going to be a large circle in the background. It will resemble a rising sun or that circular fill they put behind tattoos commonly referred to as a "shine." My big idea is to paint this candy purple, but if not there are other treatments I have in mind. If not candy paint, then I could imagine the circle being red because rising suns and shines are usually red, so I just see red. Another idea is to paint it sky blue with this hyper-realistic cloud technique you can make with shredded cardboard. I have also imagined color bombing it with every color I have like a tye dye overspray bouncy ball jawbreaker. I might do a test spray when I get to the restaurant tomorrow, and I'll show you my results. I may find a 3D object to test paint, and take it beneath various lights. I would also like to test some clear coat that I have recently obtained. I obtained one jar of gloss, and one jar of matte. I plan to mix them together to make a semi-gloss. It is my belief that 100% gloss would look bad in a dimly lit taco restaurant, the orange interior light will obscure too much of the image in a bad way. While I am hoping that a thinned out combination of both gloss and matte will give a distracting varnish to obscure my poor form and lack of imagination. Looking back on the fighting cocks, when I was told I could paint anything I wanted I should have done two things:
1.) Don't use a line drawing with so many lines, even though it instantaneously makes your art look more time-consuming, hence more virtuous. Virtue is something that is universally appreciated, so the longer your process the better artist you are. If you are a very careful person, you are a respectable person. Maybe there are pros and cons to this, but when I'm working on it I say, "Next time I do anything on a big wall, it's going to be simplified so I can do it over a weekend, not some bullshit masterpiece that I overwork until I upset myself. I need to find a large space where I can really cut loose with the airbrush. I have felt restricted in my laundry room studio, and especially by the time frame set by the business owner. Two weeks until the piece is DUE. This whole prospect is making me want to throw up. I think I painted it for selfish reasons. At first, I felt egotistical since I was invited to do it, then I realized I painted it to be a certain way and that was gross to me. So then I stopped painting all together because the mural is supposed to be fun and I have had an awful time figuring out some of the finer points about airbrushing that they don't talk about in the books and forums. I've seen master airbrushes in person, and I know I am missing whatever it is that will take me to the next step. I don't think it's going to be expensive gadgets that make me a pro. It's going to take practice. Rome was not built in a day, so I should be a little bit kinder to myself about my level of skill. If the candy paint doesn't work or if the semi-gloss coat fogs, I may never pick up an airbrush ever again.
2.) Don't over-thin your paints when painting on a wall. The paint will drip, and not contain enough pigment to apply controlled coverage. I had some nasty dripping going on, and had to jump on a bar stool with an undershirt that was to big for me. I wiped up the paint before it dried, and it showed through subsequent layers, which I thought might closely replicate the random colors of a feather. Green is an interesting translucent color, because it really tended to go from light to extremely dark in only a few passes. Maybe it was my paint mixture, I believe the Testor's green I was using is already thinned down with alcohol or some other solvent. So I double thinned this paint and it was the consistency of watercolor. I bet it would show up on a cotton shirt, but it was far too wet to use on the paint sealed wall. I need viscosity for it to cling and self-level evenly. I really think it worked out for the best in the end, I was whipping in the directions of the feathers for realism, and I started acting like a rooster while painting it, to really capture an energy in the wall. People are going to see this but not really see it. It will be a background painting that is unobtrusive to their dining experience, but brings a certain authenticity that the establishment had been missing. This attempt at mural art is my first professional endeavor. I have done murals in the past, but for never more than the cost of my materials. But now I am older, and I probably could have named a higher price, but I would do it for $100 in tacos because trade in kind is the most agreeable of transactions. We will give each other which we already freely have, and also that I will not take all what is owed until a date that is later than now! I realize now that after buying all that airbrush gear: sever jars of paint and additive, a bunch of xeroxes I didn't use but felt compelled to make, and SHARPIE PAINT MARKERS; I realize I have spent more than $100 easily. I will have tons of paint left over, so it's hard to say what is the piece actually worth? What is a painting worth to a friend if you enjoyed doing it? How can you put a price tag on that? It's an honor to be selected to do the job. They knew other people who could paint something else differently, and they have been very supportive the entire time. I hope all their compliments aren't just ways to encourage me to hurry up and get out of their way as the rest of the dining area is completed. I have been painting this mural since the room looked like a construction zone. I have come in weekly for nearly 2 months, and now they want me to finish what I've started in just 14 days. I really don't appreciate greater demands being placed on me when I'm doing them the biggest favor of their life. Two other murals that are painted in the patio area are atrocious. They rub off on my when I walk past them and the ugly gets pushed into my picture. This picture on the wall will never be the picture in my mind, and maybe there's an important life lesson I can extract from all of this. When you make a painting, it makes you too, and you get what you get just like in life. Life is full of wild mysteries beyond the comprehension of the greatest minds that have ever lived.