This week, i’m glad to say, has been one of the most productive in a while. My voice is almost fully back with only a little bit of a croak left. As with the last couple of weeks, Thursday and Friday seemed to be the most productive days.
On a side note, i’ve now bought the domain name for the website so it’s now http://www.amycrawfordart.com but the old link (www.amycrawfordart.wordpress.com) will still link to this page. That also means no ads on this page, yay!
On Monday we had a meeting discussing our assessment and degree show week. It’s scary to think that we have one month left until degree show. It’s exciting at the same time, but also worrying because I know how much I still have left to do before the 19th of May.
On Tuesday I had a really helpful tutorial with Louise who showed me a trick on Photoshop to scale my letters for the vinyl cutter. I also managed to etch the last extra part of my screens. It wasn’t the whole image, just an extra couple of plant tendrils that I felt made it look better. On Wednesday I should have really started to experiment with the letters, but I was waiting for the go ahead from Ali in the Make Lab as he was going to show me how to wire up the lights in my frames. It turned out however that he was super busy that day so after a long while of waiting around I headed home with the promise of starting them the next morning.
He was true to his word and I managed to wire up 2 frames. It wasn’t as complicated as I had thought, but I still am wary of doing it wrong as it is such an important part of the work. He showed me how to solder the positive and negative wires to the socket, making sure the temperature was 370 degrees.
On Friday I started the third frame with some slight setbacks. Some of the wood had warped, which meant I had to transfer all of the materials down to the wood workshop and put it together with help of the technicians. Turns out it wasn’t really as big an issue as I thought and was panicking over, and Malcolm also showed me a really neat trick with washers to make my screws look better. In the afternoon Ali (being the technological genius that he is) managed to connect two of my frames together to see how they looked. The second frame was slightly dimmer as I was using the small power source, but for the degree show I am using the big power source meaning the will be really bright.
I just absolutely love the way they have come out. I even love the slight blue tinge as the light passes over the etchings, so nice. My only regret was not wrapping them up in cling film earlier, as there are some small scratches that are noticeable. I kind of like the idea that they aren’t perfect, as the images themselves are not meant to be perfect and have ‘glitches’ and defects.
Next week Ali is off on holiday so I want to focus on the woodwork side of things, getting my current three screens hinged together and the wood ready for my second lot of three screens to be assembled. I also have a list of varying other activities that I need to do this week which include:
- Getting my electronics PAT tested for degree show
- Ordering my business cards
- Sorting out my words for the vinyl walls
- Get started on composing my soundtrack
- Get started making my book on the workshops I have run
So here’s to yet another busy week, will update you all next Sunday :)
amycrawfordart.com 