I remember the first day of art III like it was sixty-three days ago. My long term memory is mediocre so all I really remember is entering the room, sitting down at a table, marveling at how different the room looked from the opposite corner from the corner I used to sit at, listening briefly to somebody talk about art, and then I think I drew somebody, but that may have been the very similar sixty-two-day-ago art class. One particular memory, however, still stands clearly in my mind. Mr. Sands, standing in the center of the room, and through some forgotten conversation, I remember that he said "I always though toast would be an interesting medium to make art with, but nobody ever does it." I remember thinking, "challenge accepted." Here I am, sixty-three days later, fulfilling my promise. For my self-inflicted problem, I chose to make art solely out of toast. The image in my head was millions of tiny crumbs, ranging from burnt to untoasted, arranged on the ground like a Tibetan sand painting, depicting a windmill. It didn't take me long to realize that that is just impractical. My next idea was to take a really hot stick and poke the bread with it until a windmill appeared, which was closer to reality. Testing this idea with the soldering iron, it proved only to be effective at tearing the bread into small, soldering-iron sized pieces. I also tested using water to block whatever magic toaster ovens used to toast things from hitting the bread, which worked incredibly well and is currently my plan B. My plan A is, however, way cooler: shooting beams of heat out of a handgun-like object onto the bread and making a picture. Now, when I was thinking about what to write on this post, I planned on writing about how well this method was going, but then I realized it wasn't actually going well at all. I'll list the problems: -Even with a stencil, the heat from the heat gun is really hard to focus on one place. The stencil, after it was coated in what I can only believe is extreme sunblock, no longer lays flat on any surface, particularly the already uneven bread canvas. Any attempts to stick the stencil to the bread either doughn't work or damage the bread. The only way I've found to hold down the stencil is to stack dozens of metal rulers on top of it. Still, the image comes out not nearly as crisp (no bun intended) as I would have liked. -I have currently burned myself 11 times. Those rulers get hot.
-The stencil was paper, and I was going to be blasting large amounts of concentrated heat at it for a while, so I needed to make it fireproof. After searching around the room, I found a large paint bottle labeled "NOT PAINT DO NOT USE" so I figured, hey, I'll slather whatever this is all over the stencil. Turns out, whatever this non-paint substance was, it was fireproof. However, I only covered one side of the stencil with whatever it was; the side I would be pointing the heat gun at. Makes sense, right? Well, I discovered that while toasting the bread under the stencil, something was making smoke. It might have been the stale bread, the drawing board, the stencil itself, but whatever it was, it was getting trapped on the underside of the stencil. Yes, the non-fireproof side. I could only safely toast the bread for three seconds at a time before pulling the heat gun back to let everything cool down. A PSA to all future stencil toasters: slather BOTH sides of your stencil with mysterious fireproof substances. -If you draw a windmill a certain way, it may look like a swastika. Learn from my mistakes. -It is too tempting to use the heat gun to reach a perfect level of toastedness on some pieces of bread and one may find themselves (or others) eating their materials. This has been Problems. Tune in next week for Solutions!
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January 2015
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