This was the first time in my professional career in theatre that I’ve been able to work on props for the entire production of a show. While I was at ACT I would occasionally lend a hand in the props shop but never for the entire production. Since I joined the union hoping to be able to build props I was pretty excited to have this opportunity. During the course of the production I learned a lot, and had a lot of fun building interesting and sometimes beautiful objects. However this post is only peripherally about getting to build props for SCT.

During the course of “A Single Shard” two precious pots on their way to the capitol to be presented at the palace are broken by thieves. Early in the planning process a decision was made to have these pots broken on stage in view of the audience and so a large number of virtually identical breakable pots had to be produced so that two could be broken during every performance. The properties master made an agreement with the talented potters at Pottery Northwest to produce bisque ware pots to these specifications along with a variety of other fully fired and glazed pots that could be used in the show. At some point during the rehearsal and tech process the blocking of the action changed in such a way that the audience could no longer see the pots as they broke and as a result it made more sense to replace the actually breakable pots with reusable pots that didn’t break because it eliminated some clean up and some of the element of danger inherent in smashing actual crockery from a great height.

By this time, many of the bisque pots had already been produced and delivered to the theatre and so the dilemma was, what to do with this substantial supply of lovely but fragile pottery. I’m not sure exactly whose idea it was, but someone decided to offer the vases to local artists who had been involved with the theatre to decorate for sale at the annual Backstage gala. In March I received an email inviting me to participate and, being the over achiever that I am, I agreed to decorate two vases.

I started by drawing on the surface of the pots with pencil, and through a completely free and unpremeditated process arrived at the decision that I was going to sculpt two dragon like shapes on one vase and a winged woman shape on the other pot.

I hadn’t worked in such an open ended way in a while and the freedom was exhilarating! As an artist for hire more often than not I’m making something to somebody else’s specifications. The shapes of the vases reminded me of shapes I’d seen in Art Nouveau pottery so I decided that the shapes I was adding to them should follow a similar aesthetic. The main problem I needed to address with the construction of my design was the fragility of the materials I was working with. The pots I was given were already bisque fired so I couldn’t add more ceramic clay to them because I wouldn’t be able to fire the added clay. I decided to use the same air dry clay I used for the tiny groom. I knew I wanted to create sweeping arcs that came out from the body of the vases so in order to achieve that I had to add a wire structure to the vases for the clay to be built on. Unfortunately in my excitement to start sculpting I forgot to take a photo of that phase so here’s a picture of the pots after my first application of clay over the pencil sketches.

I took a long while refining the shapes, and I even got a friend to pose for some photos so I’d have an anatomical model for the woman’s body on the Swan Maiden vase. Once I finished the sculpting part I had to decide what kind of surface I wanted the pots to have. I decided that the wyverns should be in silhouette to draw attention to the shapes being created by their bodies, so I painted the body of the vase black and the wyverns in white. I used a water color pencil to give some shading to the mountains at the base of the vase on a last minute whim and I think it helps bring them out nicely.

Two Wyverns

The Swan Maiden gave me a harder time. I’d really loved the way the pencil outlines as I’d refined her shape made her look like a drawing on paper that was emerging into three dimensions. After pondering it for a while I decided not to paint her at all, and instead I shaded in the background with more graphite and sealed the pot with a clear varnish. I used the same watercolor pencil on the spirals that decorate the back of the pot.

The Swan Maiden

I feel really pleased with both of these vases and I am eager to see what everybody else came up with for their projects. I also feel inspired to do my own ceramic pieces sometime in the near future. I will be acquiring a small kiln sometime this summer and, baby willing, I hope I’ll be able to get it set up in my shop so I can start doing actual ceramics again.

You can see more views of the vases from different angles in the Gallery.

I have very strong feelings about politics but I’m one of those people who believe politics and religion are not polite conversation so in general I don’t write publicly about them. This February however I had the opportunity to take on a commission that speaks directly to a political cause I feel very strongly about, Marriage Equality. Through a friend I was connected with Dennis Milam Bensie whose book “One Gay American” will be published June 1st by Coffeetown Press. Dennis was looking for a sculptor who could, on slightly short notice, create a groom cake topper as part of the cover image for his book. Of course I jumped at the chance.

Love is not one of those things that should be subject to the whims of public sentiment. Who we love and how we celebrate that love is a deeply personal thing and no outside force can change our emotions. However, we live in a world of regulations and laws and they affect the way we live our lives. Married partners are afforded important rights, rights that are so interwoven with our cultural norms that they are often taken for granted by those who are afforded them. It gives me great pain that these important and seemingly ubiquitous rights are not available to all partners. All committed adults should have the right to participate in the state sanctioned institution of marriage, regardless of their gender identities. It’s just right. It’s fair. I find that emotion makes it difficult for me to speak eloquently on this matter, so I am glad that there are people out there who are driven to put their feelings into words. I support Dennis, and everyone who is out there on the public stage rallying for these essential equal rights.

After a lot of thought and discussion we decided it would be best for me to leave my job as a carpenter at ACT Theatre to concentrate on being a stay at home mom and hopefully, as I settle into motherhood, find more time for studio art. In that vein we’ve made some progress toward increasing production of the pieces I’ve already featured here. I bought myself a four station screen printing press and I hope to finish the brush up editing on the four clock work pin up girl images sometime this summer. Once that happens we’ll be making them available on T-shirts as well as ties. Further down the line I will also be producing a line of male pin up images in the same aesthetic as the clockwork ladies, for those of you who prefer the male physique. In a somewhat different aesthetic I am also working on a very cute four color kitten graphic that we’ll probably be putting on children’s shirts, though it won’t take much to convince me to make some in adult sizes. So, once I make the design public, let me know if you can’t live without one in your size.

It seems that babies and major home renovations often go hand in hand and we are no exception. In the past year we have had our entire house lifted off of its foundation and two feet of height added to our basement. I am incredibly excited about this since the basement is the location of my sewing and crafts room and the extra height turns what was previously a dim cave like space into a bright and almost airy workspace. Of course the chaos of the house remodel spilled over into my studio in the garage and I am eagerly looking forward to reclaiming it from all the construction debris. Even with the chaos I’ve managed to keep up with portrait orders so don’t let my construction woes deter you if you were thinking about buying one. I am woefully behind on posting current product images though and there are a few animals I hope to soon make available on my site that I haven’t posted before.

Another project that has been long in process is turning some of the animal portraits into greeting cards. The main delay on those has been my desire to have the frame cards around the photos be special in some way, either embossed or letterpress printed with a decorative border. After many false starts and much research into the local letterpress community I realized that this was not a skill I could easily acquire myself. Luckily I found a local company that does beautiful letterpress work on a scale that will make production of the cards affordable to me and as a result create cards that I think will be very reasonably priced. The current hold up for this project is finding the time to design the border and while I’ve made several attempts at this I have not yet landed on exactly the right result. While I hesitate to put a date on it, knowing how fully absorbed we’ll be with our new family member once she arrives, I hope to have something to share on this project by the fall maybe in time for winter greeting card purchases. In addition to this, and perhaps somewhat earlier than this fall, I will be making a small batch of wedding themed cards available. I produced this image for our wedding thank you cards and I love it so much I want to share it with all of you.

We had a lovely time at Indian Springs in Calistoga, and now we’re back so why, you ask, are there still no ties on the Artfire storefront? Well, I’ll tell you, apparently when you sell certain fiber products, the Federal Trade Commission requires that you put a label on them listing a few particular things like fiber content, who made the item and where they made it. I discovered this right before we left for our trip so I didn’t have a chance to design a logo and order labels until this week. The label company is working on a quote and some art for me right now and I think it’s going to be a few weeks before I have the labels in my hands. I promise once I do and they’re sewn on the ties I’ll get them posted on Artfire. Here’s a photo of some of the ties that will be available soon.

All of the ties in this photo are Evie, but I have all of the colors pictured with both Evie and Mary Jane.

Not pictured is a brown and green peacock brocade, the lining has Mary Jane printed on it.

In the mean time, since I promised something new once we got back from our trip, I’m going to be posting three storytime portrait pairs on my Artfire store. The stories are two Aesop’s Fables, The Tortoise and the Hare and the Fox and the Crow, and the Edward Lear poem The Owl and the Pussycat. I’m really happy with how they turned out and as soon as I edit the photos of them I’ll post them on the store.

If you are near Portland, Oregon you can go see some of my portraits in person at the brand new Paxton Gate store that opened recently on Mississippi. Stop in and take a look around, everything they have there is fabulous and I think their store makes a lovely addition to the quirky stores along Mississippi.

If you were thinking about buying a portrait directly from me in the next month or so I have to warn you that my stock of frames is a little low and while I did buy new moulding just before we left on our honeymoon my shop currently looks like this:

This afternoon Nick came home with a bundle of insulation and we started moving things away from the walls so that we could install it. In a few hours we got two thirds of one of the long walls finished and that process included pulling out wiring and nails that were in the wall so we had a clean slate to work with and then attaching 2×2 boards along the 2×4 studs so that the walls were the proper depth for the insulation.

Nick is optimistic that he’ll be able to finish the insulating and rewiring project in the next two weeks. After that my access to the chop saw and my workbench should be back to normal and I can make a whole new batch of frames hopefully without shivering myself to pieces.

Back at home I spent some time organizing the shop and sewing room. We created a cutting table by cleaning off and covering an old free standing work bench that the previous owner built. We also ran power over to the corner where my sewing table is set up. I am amused by the rustic third-world nature of my environs right now. Eventually we’ll be framing in and insulating walls down in the basement but for now I can tell stories in my head about sewing in the old country.

I carved a bit of space out in the shop so I could spray adhesive on the chipboard and then I moved my whole production into the living room where the warmer temperatures would help the glue cure and keep me from making zigzag lines due to shivering. Insulating and putting up wallboard in the shop is another of those things that’s on the to do list.

Why yes, I do have a 7′ scrabble board rug, and I used to have tiles for it too but I lost them somewhere along the way. Nick and I are eager to make new tiles and, lucky for us, letter templates for the router were among the tools left behind in our house!

Since I’m going to be cutting silk with a rotary cutter, and since my pattern is too thick to pin through, I’ll want some pattern weights to keep the patterns where I put them as I’m cutting. I happen to have half a bag of sandbox sand from another project and I also have a lot of random leather scraps so I decided to cut out some leather to make the weights from. Sewing them up will be a task for next week though because I’ll need to set up my industrial machine and that’s still out in the garage with some re-assembly required. All in all I feel pretty pleased with my progress.

Yesterday I went to the fabric store and picked up more silks for the ties. I found out just after my last post that the fern fabric is back ordered. As I said in that post, prints for ties are difficult to find so I decided to go with solid colors in addition to the black maze pattern. Solid colors give me the added option of printing graphics on the front of the tie so a few of them will be done that way. The four pieces on the bottom are the shell fabric and the red and ivory at the top of the photo are lining fabrics. The shell fabrics are all 100% silk and the lining is 50/50 cotton and silk. I’m excited to start sewing again!

Evie

and Mary Jane

Today I received some of the silk brocades that I will be using as the main bodies of the ties. It is surprisingly difficult to find good tie pattern fabrics and I was a little disappointed that the bottom two pieces in this picture were only remnants that didn’t turn out to be big enough to make a tie.  The black maze pattern is still quite nice, and Nick says it’s his favorite anyway.

There’s one more piece still on its way to me and that one I also have high hopes for, here’s a photo from the website I purchased it at.

In addition I’m going to look around locally for some solid colors, probably a black or silver and a nice deep red. As I finish the ties I’ll be posting them in my shop on ArtFire but if you know you’ll be wanting to purchase one don’t hesitate to let me know ahead of time and I’ll make sure you get it in time for the holiday. If you have a particular color in mind, even if it’s not one of the colors I mentioned, let me know and I’ll see what I can find in the fabric stores.

These ties will be made using the screens we burned for our wedding and once I finish this run of ties I will be washing out the screens. However, if you don’t manage to pick up one of the girls from this set, or if you had your heart set on one of the other two girls, don’t despair. I’m going to be doing some small revisions to the art in order to fine tune the screens and once I’ve finished them I will be burning new more permanent screens and bringing the full set to my store.

Not so obvious is the fact that Nick and I have bought a house! We’re in the process of moving in now and I’m going to be moving my studio out of Old Ballard and into the two car garage less than ten feet from our back door. I’m excited to have so much space so near our home and I’m already scheming about the table saw I want to buy. In the mean time I have set up a temporary office space in the house and I’m working on a new animal portrait for a special request.

Unfortunately the move put several more elaborate projects on hold, the greeting cards for instance will probably be pushed back into next year. Progress on them hasn’t completely stopped though, I am going to visit the studio of an artist who teaches letterpress classes the last week of this month. I’ve been wanting to learn letterpress for a while now and I think the greeting cards would look much better if the decorative borders I am envisioning were printed that way rather than on a laser printer.

Things might remain a bit quiet around here until the new year, I hope your holiday celebrations are festive!

In 2009 Nick and I flew down to the Bay Area to see Berkeley Rep’s production. We got a back stage tour which simultaneously convinced us that we really wanted to do this show and we probably wouldn’t get to because of the cost. So when our 2010 season was announced we were really excited to see Inishmore on the list. This show is big, beyond the limits of hyperbole big. This show is so big that research and development for the special effects in our production started last season.

As is often the case when we have a show of this size and complexity, the shops have been working on elements of this production in between the other shows all year. We’ve tested pneumatic gizmos that mimic the various effects of gunshots, done extensive research into robotic cats, and there has been exhaustive testing to determine which fake blood recipes are easiest to wash out of costumes. Oh yes, this show is not for the squeamish. All of which brings me to the specific subject of this post; building the body doubles for three of our actors which will be dismembered on stage during every single performance.

I came to this project partway through when it was determined that an extra pair of hands with some sculpting experience would be useful. At this point life molds of the actors had been made and foam rubber replicas of their heads and shoulders had arrived in our shops along with an assortment of other body parts. My task was to take the rigid headless foam bodies and transform them into believable stand-ins for actors who are rather more attached to their extremities than is useful for our purposes and much more difficult to reassemble.

My first task was to articulate the joints on the bodies and reinforce the foam so that it will stand up to use during the show. I was also given a map of the stage showing where each corpse will be during the scene, which body parts will be pre-cut and which ones are removed during the action. This entire project was surreal and I admit to taking a certain ghoulish glee in it. One of my chats with Marne, our props master, involved deciding which of the life cast body parts she’d purchased would be used on which corpse.

I also spent some time figuring out whether we wanted to use a flexed or pointed foot on the body that gets his foot cut off. I borrowed some shoes from the costume department to see which foot was easier to dress. In the end we decided that the pointed toes were more realistic.

Here’s a picture of me cutting the foot off of the ankle so I could reattach it in a way that would flop in a realistically dead manner. Both ankles on this fellow got that treatment but only one of them is also dismember-able. In the photo on the right you might notice that there’s a curved line sticking out of the severed ankle, this is the end of a blood delivery system before it was trimmed flush.

It turns out that ribbons of lycra gathered into ruffles make passable tendons when you saturate them with red tinted latex.

Two of our crew also donated body parts to the show. Thomas, one of the props artisans, gave us his knee and Max, our Master Sound Engineer, donated both of his hands.

Don’t worry, I gave them back when I finished with them. Although it was a near thing, and we did keep some of Thomas’s leg hair. Oops! There was a bit of a learning curve involved for all of us.

All in all this has been a fantastic project and I learned a lot during the weeks I was on loan to the props department. I can’t wait to see the bodies in action on opening night!

Next I’m working on a Fox and a Crow from the Aesop’s Fable of that name. Each pair will be framed with the text or an excerpt from the story they’re based on depending on the length of the tale. Here’s an example of what I think they’ll look like once they’re matted.

The framing and matting costs a bit more for something of this size so I’m not sure what the price for these portraits will be as yet. However, I also plan to frame them individually so if you fall in love with one but not the other don’t despair.

In related news, production of the note cards has stalled slightly due to a combination of things, though predominantly I admit I was a little caught up with planning my wedding. I will be back to working on those as soon as I send out the portraits for this show and I hope to have something fun to share by Christmas.