Studio Day

 I want to give my most recent block a few more days to dry before I cut some more out of it, so I decided to work on something else today.  Made a number of stops on the way there, then pulled into the main lot of the art building in late morning.  No meetings going on in the hallway today, so I went right to my space.

Several months ago I cut up my last piece of lauan, left over from a long time ago, and surfaced two pieces with wood filler.  I had decided to buy it in tube form this time and found it very difficult to get on to the boards.  So this time I decided just to slice open the tube and get it out that way.  Meanwhile, I had been working on straightening out the boards not used for the last boardwalk print, especially after I noticed the curvature in the board I had used.  To do this I was clamping the two remaining boards to my table, gradually increasing the number of pieces on the far ends, trying to bend it in the opposite direction of the bend that the wood already had.  Below shows what that looked like:

Last week I had decided that this clamping process seemed to be working, and that the board intended for the next boardwalk print was fairly straight.  It's also the one I hadn't surfaced with wood filler yet.   Still, I left it in the clamp one more time, and took it out today.  The curve was almost gone, and when placed down on my table, it laid flat.  A good sign.  

I remembered from last time that it was very hard to squeeze that wood filler tube, and deciding there wasn't that much left in it anyway, decided the easiest thing would be to just slash open the tube and pull out what I needed.  Problem- I left my cutting tools at home this morning, and I know I keep an x-acto knife in there, perfect for this task.  Okay, I think there's a knife in my blue pencil bag.  Use that.  Problem #2- when I got to the Studio, I discovered that the pencil bag wasn't in my back pack, so it must also be at home.  On the plan #3- use an metal ink knife from my printing go-bag to open the tube.  A quick stab and a slash, and that tube was open.  Took some out with my ink knife, and used one of Molly's plastic putty knives to spread it thin, then used some fine grit sandpaper from my drawer to smooth it out after it was dry.  (you can see this bit on the linked post near the top of this one)  

I decided to go ahead and do the next step- putting in the panel borders.  Kept it the same as all the other boardwalk print- a diptych with little concave corners, like so many other Japanese woodcut prints.  An image of that can be seen below:

As for what is going there- I have an idea, but I will wait to post that information until after I have a start on the drawing.  My two previously clamped boards were now on top of the table, under another board and some other stuff.  I stopped by the office, and the people were back at their desks.  Jeanne confirmed that she had gotten email from me yesterday (teaching and showing) and hadn't looked at it yet, but would.  I left it at that.  And he leftover wood filler and open tube, I wrapped those up with wax paper (had a roll in my print bag) for the trip home.

For music today, one from the pop/rock book, my Studio copy of the 1999 Red Hot Chili Peppers album, Californication.  (written about best in June of 2020 if you want to know more)  According to this blog, it's been a few years since I had it in the Studio, so it seemed a good time to bring it and listen to it.  It played fine in my Studio machine until track #10, when it would suddenly pause for a long moment.  Did this a few times and I gave up, but track #11 didn't want to start either.  So I stopped it, took out the disc, replaced it, started with track #10, and it played through with no problems.