2018 Progress Report: April

The month of April was all about getting my P2 project (later renamed Prison of the Mind) finished and ready for my show. Sadly, while the project did get done, I do not have any pictures of the final product to show at this time. I'll have to include it in a future post. A lot of long work hours went into that project despite it's small size. The process that involved drawing was tedious and took a really long time. In the end, I was happy with the final result. The upcoming May progress report will focus on the projects that didn't get finished in time for my show and the progression of those projects.

Just to let everyone know, now that the summer is here, I'm preparing to do more work on various unfinished projects as well as investing time into making new button designs. This work does require a major investment on my part. Though I am not begging, if anyone wants to support the development of these projects, feel free to donate to my Patreon.

https://www.patreon.com/Jon_Erich

4/2/18: I finally began my drawings. They are based on pictures taken of my left eye and my mouth.

4/3/18: The drawings have developed quite a bit since the previous day. This is the phase of the drawing that I always refer to as the rough phase. It is where the drawing is progressing to the point where I get an idea of what the final results might look like, but there are still too many rough spots to be considered finished.

4/10/18: I believe this was the last day before I started using the pastels. I was supposed to use pastels, but I forgot to bring them with me.

4/11/18: I finally started using the pastels. Notice how most of everything looks softer and brighter than it did before.

4/16/18: I made a soft black border using a combination of charcoal sticks and black pastels. Part of the reason for doing this is for the aesthetics while the more practical reason is because it tells me what will be in the middle of the ceramic piece I will end up laying over these drawings.

4/17/18: The two drawings are finally glued to the ceramic piece, though the work on the project is still far from done. 

4/17/18: This is the back of the ceramic piece where the two drawings were glued down. Though it is hard to see, notice each piece was marked as top and bottom. As I mentioned in a previous post, my original intention was to have it be piece sheet of bristolboard with two drawings. It would have made the gluing process less of a pain.

4/17/18: This is the piece of foam board that were be the back of Prison of the Mind. The wood piece where the hooks will hang has been glued down. The thicker piece of foam board are glued at the bottom so the piece will be balanced on the wall. The outline in the middle is where the printed label will go.

4/17/18: Bristolboard has been glued down in the middle since I prefer to glue the labels down on white backgrounds. Chicken wire covers the wood and bottom hump in order to give the piece a somewhat organic aesthetic.

4/20/18: The laminated label has been glued down.

4/20/18: Canvas now covers the back and sides of the piece.

4/22/18: The canvas has been gessoed.

4/23/18: Molding paste work was done on the back. The back had to be done prior to the sides so that the specific design-style on the side can be preserved.

4/24/18: The sides and inter parts of the piece are done.  Now I need to paint them.

4/25/18: The painting is done. It took a while and a combination of many types of acrylic and metallic paints  to make everything look consistent with the ceramic parts of the piece. This piece still isn't done. It still needs work and sadly, I do not have pictures of the final piece ready yet.

4/25/18: The back has been spray painted as a undercoat. The white square that remains around the labels in the result of the label being covered while I was spray painting. The white at the bottom is the result of the spray paint getting stuck to the table. Within the following two days, the back along with the rest of the piece will be finished.

2018 Progress Report: March

When we left off in February I had finished firing a few pieces in the raku kiln but some of those pieces didn't turn out right. During March, these pieces were fired again and the results were much better. I also finally started on some drawings. While there aren't too many March pictures, a lot was going on nonetheless. Even more will happen in April.

3/5/18: I'm using the same glazes as before.

3/5/18: I'm using the same glazes as before.

3/14/18: The results were much better this time around.

3/14/18: I'm happy with these results.

3/28/18: There are a lot of rough edges here, but I still managed to start a drawing on the top piece of P13 nonetheless.

3/28/18: I started the drawing on the bottom piece of P13.

3/28/18: This should have been one single piece of bristol board with two drawings, but I had to make it two drawings since I did not have enough Bristol board at the time to make one complete piece.

2018 Progress Report: February

In February, a lot of projects started moving forward. The wet clay work for the mixed media projects was completed during the month and I was able to move on to the next step. Having the projects survive the bisque firing was a very important step toward progressing because I needed to have everything intact so I could trace a proper shape around the foam board that I would use as the back for these pieces. I did have an unfortunate setback because I was running low on both large sizes of foam board and bristol board, the latter which I would need for the drawings. This meant that I could make significant progress on only two pieces this month. Some other good news is that the P13 project which never seems to want to get done has been moving forward yet again.

That's all I have for right now. Sorry it took so long to get this post out. I've been busy trying to get ready for my show. I hope to have both March and April reports out soon.

2/5/18: P1 has survived the bisque firing. I don't plan on gluing it back together until after the raku firing.

2/5/18: Just like P1, P2 survived the bisque firing. It will be be raku fired.

2/5/18: P13 is still in development after a long time and will continue to be for some time. In this particular picture, I'm using foam board to rise the surface so there will be more space for the drawing that I eventually plan on doing.

2/6/18: The flat pieces were glued down and each of them were marked to indicate which drawing goes where. To the left are the pieces of bristol board that are the same shape as the flat panels. They'll be glued onto the panels as soon as the drawings are done.

2/6/18: I put down the glazes for the raku firing. I used raku black and raku red.

2/6/18: I put down the glazes for the raku firing. I used raku black and raku red.

2/12/18: This is currently known as P4. It will be a 3-panel mixed media piece. This will be the only piece that will stay in one piece prior to the bisque firing.

2/12/18: This is currently known as P5. This will be a 4-panel piece. This particular piece has some unusual textures compared to the other ones. It will have to be broken up into multiple parts.

2/14/18: This is currently known as P9. It is a 5-panel piece. Like P5, this will also have to be broken up into multiple pieces prior to the bisque firing.

2/14/18: The raku firing for this piece is done.

2/14/18: The raku firing for P2 is done.

2/20/18: P4 survived the bisque firing.

2/20/18: P5 survived the bisque firing.

2/20/18: P9 survived the bisque firing.

2/20/18: This uses the same black and red glazes that the other pieces used.

2/20/18: This uses the same black and red glazes that the other pieces used.

2/20/18: This uses the same black and red glazes that the other pieces used.

2/28/18: The bristolboard panel and the foam board panel have been created.

2/28/18: The foam board panel and bristolboard pieces have been made. I used two individual pieces of bristolboard because I did not have a large enough piece. I wish it had been a single piece because it would have been easier to do.

2/28/18: The raku firing is done.

2/28/18: The raku firing is done, but it'll have to be re-fired. The kiln was having issues 

2/28/18: Like P5, this will also need to be fired again.

2018 Progress Report: January

I'm finally catching up on these posts. In January, I started doing work towards the end of the month, which is why I have only six pictures. I was working on three different projects. Two of them involved clay while another one was simply a continuation of my P13 project that never seems to want to end. The clay projects look somewhat minimal, but that's only because it is just one part in what will eventually become a mixed media project. With the P13 project, you're only seeing the back right now because I decided to make changes from last year. I'm adding additional wood pieces for hanging hooks. I made this decision after having a few pieces over the last year and a half that I had a hard time hanging on the wall the way I wanted them to hang because of the lack of hanging hooks or how the hooks were arranged. I want to prevent this from happening again.

In the February Report, there will be more pictures of the projects I started working on in January as well as additional projects. I am almost certain that the February Report will be the next post, but I can't say for sure.

1/24/18: Even though I worked very carefully on this shape, it will eventually break into multiple pieces. I pretty much constructed this with those expectations. I opted not to build these by using multiple pieces because it would be easier for me to repair a clean break later on.

1/29/18: I decided to add two more wood pieces for hanging hooks. I placed them on pieces of half inch thick foam board in order to even out the surface some more.

1/29/18: Chicken wire is being used to even out the surface.

1/29/18: Canvas is being used to cover the chicken wire and wood.

1/31/18: Like the other clay piece, this will break because of how thin and fragile it is. Again, I prepared for this ahead of time. The breaks will be clean and will be repaired easily.

1/31/18: After strengthening the canvas with gesso, a marker was used to indicate where the wood pieces are. 

2018 Projects and Plans

Even though this should have been posted all the way back in January, I have faced some inconveniences in my life over the last few months which has forced me to keep revising my plans. Nonetheless, I do have a lot of work planned for the year.

Finances
Within a 2 week period between January 22 and the day before my birthday, I lost my job and my computer needed to be replaced since it decided not to work anymore. Losing my main source of income and having to spend money that I don't have is not a very good combination. Because of these inconveniences, I had to put certain plans on hold such as my intention to start making stickers to sell. I believe that is something I had announced last summer. Buttons have been at a standstill too. There will be new designs coming, but probably not until much later in the year. For now, I will make use of my current inventory which is still a lot. Basically, anything that requires a lot of financial investment is getting pushed back for the time being. I should also mention that I have finally created a Patreon account. Hopefully, this will help me in the near future with financing projects. I'll provide the link below. In case anyone asks, I'm not begging for money. Even if you have no intentions of giving anything, I would like to encourage everyone who reads this to look at the page and give me feedback on the design of the page, the pictures I used and the descriptions I left.
https://www.patreon.com/Jon_Erich

Shows
I originally had no intentions of doing any shows in the spring, mostly because I had shown off almost all of my 2017 work at my last show and felt that I wouldn't have too much new work ready for the spring. While I wouldn't have minded having some 2017 work in a new show, I have a rule I made for myself where I try not to have the same work present in a solo show in the same gallery more than twice within 18 months. However, because I lost my job, that would give me more time to prepare a show and so that's what I decided to do. The only drawback is that some of the more ambitious projects will have to be pushed back to the fall or later because of how much money will be required to finish these projects. The show I am currently preparing for will be going up at the end of April. I'll be talking more about it soon.

Projects
I won't go into this too much. I'll leave a picture below like I normally do. As I mentioned before, my plans have been revised several times. In fact, I had to change them again prior to making this post. I'm confident that I pushed everything back enough to where I won't have to change anything else this year.

2018 Projects

That pretty much covers it for right now. Whenever I find employment or some other reliable source of income, I will update the status of other long planned, long overdue endeavors such as stickers, books, Youtube and other things. As of right now, what I presented here are more immediate plans for the future. The next post should be the January Report. That shouldn't take too long to post...