Prepping

It's been a very short time since I talked to you last, but I wanted to let you know what I have been up to today.  As you know I am gluing all of my books to sheets of wood to make a grid like system underneath.  That means I need a lot of wood and as I was about to get wood from Lowe's my professor told me about (11) 4' x 4'  sheets of wood that were left behind by past students with their paintings on them.  So....I snagged all of them.  My boyfriend so graciously cut all of them into 2' x 2' squares on Sunday so that I could prep them for the books today.  All in all there are 44 squares available for me to use.  Here is a picture of all of them cut and stacked

I started off by painting over each of them in white to cover up the side that had a painting on it.  This side will be going against the wall.  I painted 10 out of the 44 today so that I can glue the books on tomorrow.  Here is a picture of all of them drying.

Then, after these dried I painted a grey acrylic wash onto the other side.  I didn't want to do a thick layer of paint since I need the wood glue to adhere to the wood grain.  So, I did a very thin and light layer of grey so the grain was still visible, but the color of the wood was muted out a little bit.  Here are the drying ones. 

So, tomorrow I can start gluing the books down.  It should be fun!!!

I have also been doing more tape transfers.  Here are all of the ones I have done on my wall

And here are a few close ups

I think they have all turned out really cool.  I decided I want to do a large one about 4' x 4'.  I picked out a picture I wanted to do and made sure it was blurred enough.  Then, I went into photoshop and set up a grid so that each section was 8" x 8".  I printed out each section on a separate piece of paper and labeled them with a code based on the grid.  So, now I can do the tape transfer and when it is finished I will still know where each piece of tape goes.  All of the prior tape transfers have been going onto paper, but I think I want to put this one onto wood or something sturdy.  I just have to decide specifically what I want the treatment to be on the surface.  I am super pumped to get going on these things tomorrow!

Rachel