Polyurethaning

Hello All!  It has been a week since I have written anything and my goodness a lot has happened.  We met with the Aaron who runs the galleries at UC.  He is a very intense man, but he is very good at what he does.  He went over our trial run of our DAAPWorks art show at the end of the school year.  This trial run is in....3 weeks...did your heart drop? Because mine did.  Every time I hear 3 weeks it just sinks in how little time that is.  Not to say that I don't think I can be ready by then...I definitely can.  But I still seem to panic about it.  But any who.  I have been working on several things and ideas, but this entry I am mainly going to focus on my polyurethane cubes that I have been making.

First, I want to let you know that I left my books glued onto a 2' by 2' sheet of wood hanging on my wall in my studio.  And after an entire week the books didn't budge one bit.  I am very excited about the process of gluing these books to the wood now.  Here is the sheet hanging in the critique room from Thursday.  Obviously it looks kind of the same, but it is nice to see it out of my crammed studio.

Okay, on to the polyurethane.  So, the ones I had drying last week turned out pretty good.  Here is a picture of all of the done ones together. 

So, overall there are 34.  Some I like more than others.  Here are some of the ones I like better.

So, I think they are really interesting.  I am super pumped about them.  I feel like they exude the idea of loss, and I thought it would be cool to display them on a light box with labels.  That way you could see the affect of the light without having to touch them.  The labels would hopefully give off an idea of inventory, storage, or scientific specimen.  

It usually takes about a week for the polyurethane to dry.  So, I decided to go to Lowe's to see if they had anything that would dry faster.  I found water based polyurethane that said it dried faster on the label.  It looked a hell of a lot different when I opened the can of it.  Here is a picture below of the water based filled in the molds.  I was super scared that it wouldn't dry the same as the other ones.  But, when a small bit dried on a piece of paper it seemed to be the same color.  So, I wasn't as concerned until they weren't drying as fast as I expected them to.  

Here is the first tray that I did at home that took over a week to dry.  As you can see that they look a little funny. They sunk in and they have holes in some of them.  They are supposed to be viewed from the back but the back is still gooey and you can't see the photos through the back. 

Here are some of the individual ones.  They aren't bad, they are still a little interesting, but they aren't the look that I'm going for.

The image can still be seen in some of them, but this is supposed to be the back.

These next two are particularly cool, especially the way the holes work with the photos.

Here is an example of a bad one since there is a hole straight through it and you cant even see the photo.

I flipped over all of them so the backs can dry.  Once this happens I am going to see how they look.  I may end up being happy with them.  I am going to go ahead and let the other tray in my studio dry.  But, I got some regular polyurethane today and more molds.  I plan on filling the two molds I just got and the one I just emptied with regular polyurethane today or tomorrow so that I have 72 squares drying at the same time.

I am planning on doing something with these for the trial show in 3 weeks.  So I need to get a move on since these dry so slow.  My professor suggested doing some photos that are a little more precise because I am doing blurred images and the polyurethane blurs them even more.  We will see how that looks.  I will talk to you soon with an update.

Rachel