February 27th, 2011

Sunday Morning.  Last night I printed until very late at night at my dad’s office.  I woke up fairly late this morning and posted my previous days to the blog.  Later this evening, was Junie’s birthday party.  June’s actual birthday is tomorrow but today was the party.  It was just a small get together with our family.  We had planned on throwing something larger in the park but we cancelled it because there was going to be rain all weekend.  The actual weather turned out to be pretty beautiful, but random.  It snowed in Burbank yesterday.  It was sunny for most of the day with little spots of rain.  Although it was quite cold all day.  Anyways, Jenny and I were both a little relieved to be celebrating low-key this year.  With the prep for the show happening simultaneous we just felt better taking it easy.  It was a fun day and June had a blast.

I decided on this particular creative project on the way home from Junie’s party.  A good while back, my friend Jeff Ponchick sent me a link to this video where a group of artists were creating these interesting swirls of color by pouring small cups of paint on top of a wooden box sculpture.  They called it “Tall Painting”.  Jeff thought it might be a good project for The B-Roll.  I thought, “well, that seems easy enough”

The only drawback to this Tall Painting project is that it seems like a pretty expensive project with the amount of paint they’re using.  Luckily, I had this box of paints in my garage that I picked up at a garage sale for 20 bucks so I felt like I was in a good position to try it out.

It wasn’t as easy as it looks.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  It seems easy if you set up your pieces correctly.  One of those pieces is something called paint consistency, which I had very little of.  Most of the paints in the box were dried out, many of them halfway there so that when you squeezed it out it came all lumpy.  I sifted the bottles to find the good ones and set them aside.

I laid down a sheet of plastic and placed a cheap plank of wood down, mine came from an old ikea table we used to own.  On top of that I taped two cardboard boxes on top of each other.  I leveled everything out so that the paint would flow equally in all directions.

I squeezed out my first bit of paint and it just sat there.  It was too thick.  OK, I cleaned off the boxes and drove to the nearest market and I bought a package of mini paper cups.  I decided I would dilute the paint with water so it would flow better.  That seemed to start working but it was quite hard to create the same level of flow between the various paints.  Nevertheless, it seemed to be working better and I felt like it was perhaps going to come together.  Then, as I squeezed a bottle fluorescent pink into a little paper cup, it suddenly exploded in my hand and blew pink all over my clothing.  I, stupidly, hadn’t changed into painters clothes so I had to jump into emergency clean-up mode.

I was able to get the stains out of my clothing but the sad pile of paint outside looked pretty ugly.  I tried adding more paint but again I would get the consistency wrong and it would flow all wrong.  Eventually, I got frustrated and impatient and just threw caution to the wind.  I stopped diluting altogether and just started wasting the paint.  I was still left with a very sad looking pile of paint.  Oh well.

I figured the only way I could make up for this creative project was to attempt to capture some nice close-up pictures of it as it certainly didn’t look very good from a wide angle.  So, I grabbed my camera and snapped away.  In the end I felt like I got some nice pictures of it but that was pretty much it.

Later, my friend Christie told me that the paint they were using in the video could have been house paint.  The reason being that it’s the cheapest paint you can buy and you know that the consistency will be the same across the board.  If I ever try this again I will definitely use house paint.