Past Blasters: Volume One, Issue Two.
Previously on
Past Blasters I covered the sketches I made in anticipation of painting a mural in the summer of 2009. A mural that would come to be known as...
Dr. Laser's Revenge
!!!!
In the second week of August I took a trip to my frathouse, kicked out the guy living in my dorm, (he had an apartment), and dragged everything out of the room. It looked like this:
 |  |
| An empty room. | A messy hallway. |
The room without anything in it was a narsty place. One of the walls was covered in accumulated drunk scribblings spilling off the door and mostly in smeared crayon. The previous year I had experimented in gluing CDs to the ceilings, but the ceilings in the house had a
popcorn treatment, which made gluing tedious and tenuous. Since I had more CDs and further ideas, the popcorn posed a problem. The crayons, the ceiling and the total lack of color all had to go.
 |
| "Miniona <3" I wish I had kept. |
 |
| I Eat Asbestos. |
I made decent progress the first few days. I scraped the popcorn ceiling, which is pretty easy with a spray bottle and a paint scraper. I painted the ceiling, primed and painting the walls, and glued up the CDs. I also attempted to "prep" my canvas. The wall I was working with had an
orange peel finish, which, given the detail of my drawings, was not ideal. I had anticipated this, but did not have a clear idea of how to surmount the problem. I could have re-plastered the wall but c'mon- I not some sort of professional craftsman, nor am I made of money. So I took my family's rotary sander with me, and applied it to the wall.
The wall, it turned out, was already bowing in and cracked. This is due to a fact I discovered when I took down a dartboard that had been nailed to the wall. The wall, my canvas, was put up over a window. The window is visible from outside of the house. The gap has not been insulated in any way; light comes in through the nail holes. You can peep through them.
Sanding was not effective. I wore down all of the grit wheels at my disposal and did not make any part of the wall appreciably smoother. I did kick up a lot of dust, however. After sanding set off the smoke alarm in my room, I put a shower-cap over the detector. Further sanding set off the smoke alarm in another room.
 |  |
| that's not me | that's a rat on the loose |
I then turned my attention to the door. The door to the room had two pre-existing elements I wanted to keep. It named the room, "Dr. Laser's Office" (Dr. Laser is a a demo bar). The bottom half of the door said "HELP" in flames. Otherwise the door was covered in forgettable things. In order to keep the elements I wanted, I repainted them in black. Then I painted the whole door in red. The sections in black showed through. After a second coat of red, I repainted the black outlines, thus preserving the elements I wanted and covering extraneous details.
 |
| that's not me |
 |
| that's not hell, it's help. |
During this whole time I was also working on an even more elaborate project, renovating a room in the basement. My attentions were thus divided, and I began to slow down. The story of that renovation has been recounted elsewhere, but I think I can sum it up with two pictures:
 |  |
| this actually is hell. | this is a purington paver |
Regardless, after a significant fit of labor, I was good to resume full time work on the mural.
Last time, I mentioned that my approach suffered from not being well thought out. In the first place, I distrusted my measurements. They were made, alone, while the room was still full of somebody else and their stuff. I wasn't sure exactly the size of the wall I was working with, and wanted to be able to adapt to that.
Moreover, I overlooked practical measures that would have saved me time in favor of technological gizmos promised to make work easier. An overhead projector, I am still convinced, would have worked (better). I would have had to print out everything on transparencies, and possibly print the sketches on several sheets, but it was something I was prepared for. An overhead projector was not forthcoming, I could not find one to borrow and they are actually very expensive.
At this point, I should have realized the easy way to do this required photoshop (which I had been working with), no projector, and a smidge more confidence behind a brush than I had at that point.
Instead I started looking at the commercial grade projectors in the art store, and because I was on a budget, bought the cheapest one. The
Tracer Jr. The Tracer Jr. is something best used to entertain a child wanting to draw a large version of a sticker. It should never be used for a mural. The projection window is 3 square inches. There is no way to raise or lower the projection except for the elevation of what it's sitting on. The Tracer Jr. is very wobbly. Perhaps the Tracer Sr. has sturdier legs.
After a few days of stacking up boxes and arranging lofted beds and trying to block all the light out of the room and sweating I managed to draw a rough outline of my pictures, projected on the wall.
 |
| It looks easy enough. |
 |
| But using it feels like this. |
So how could this agony have been avoided? Simple, draw a 1 foot grid on the wall, create a gird over the mural picture in photoshop and re-draw (or paint directly) on to the wall. At the time, I did not consider this option. I probably would have been suspect of it in any case. Until the point when I was standing at the wall with the Tracer Jr. in use, I thought I would be reproduce all the details in the paper copy directly on the wall. I thought painting would be akin to coloring-in what was already there. I really imagined it would be like a coloring book writ large. In fact, until rather late in the game I planned to outline everything with cartoony black lines at the end. Most of these preconceptions were shattered.
At the end of my visit, I was far from done. I had a some of the characters in the mural painted, but no background and no details. I had to leave with much of it undone, and I had to come back to school early and work like a marathon runner to finish it.
This is how things looked at the end of my mid-summer trip:
 |  |
| I also built this couch | And sawed the top off that bunk bed |
 |  |
| The Beksinski is by my roommate. | It's a lonely planet with no arms. |
Next time I'll cover how I worked myself to the bone to finish this thing before I crash landed into my senior year. I'll talk about how I discovered how to paint, and what techniques I stumbled across. I might even discuss what I think the work could mean. Or not. Mostly I'm going to talk about Galaxy Black.
Also there will be pictures, lot of pictures. /wg/ quality pictures.
