Mylo Update

Previously:


Tonight:


At one point I thought I might be messing things up, but now I think I'm still doing well.

I was fighting with the paint tonight. The air was so dry, the paint on my palette kept forming skins. I think I've figured out now which colours I need on my palette, and which I can leave in the tube until needed. Maybe. I'm also considering using my wet palette, even though I don't plan to save paint between sessions. (I only paint at most once a week, and a wet palette would go moldy if I used it like that.)

Remember how another artist asked why there was so much blue? Well, as I was cleaning up tonight, he asked if I had been working on a darker German shepherd before. (Nope, same painting, just further along.)

Mylo Update

When last you saw Mylo:

(I actually finished off a bit further along than this, if you remember.)

At the end of tonight:


I started off with the highlights on the chain. Then I added a few more colours to my palette, and re-marked the line between the dark patch and light patch below his nose. A few more colours, and I worked on the dark patches of fur. A few more colours, and I started working on other areas of his fur... except they weren't turning out the way I wanted. I think it's because when I work on something like Mylo's fur, I like to pick out and arrange the colours I'm planning on using on the palette, but this time I had everything all over, and not enough of my yellows, browns, oranges and rusts. So I stopped working on his fur and cleaned my palette. By then it was a little late to put out all the fur colours, so I picked four for the stucco and did that, and then cleaned up a few more separating lines. I may glaze the stucco with blue to push it back a bit, but I'll see after I get Mylo done.

Mylo is more of a challenge to paint than Raffi. I'm still enjoying the process, though, and I'm sure I'll get him looking good in the end. ;) For now, the chain looks awesome, at least, and the stucco looks stucco-ish.

Income and Expense... and Nice Things

Yesterday evening I sold a painting while drinking hot chocolate and eating a raspberry chocolate brownie. Then I snuggled an eight-week-old baby instead of knitting. (Well, a few other people wanted turns with the baby, so I did do a *bit* of knitting.) Then, on my way to the bus home, I petted a puppy. Can an evening get better than that?

There's an art supply store in Winnipeg going out of business (sad!), and so are having a sale on everything (happy!). Since I made $100 on the painting yesterday, I decided to reward myself with some new supplies: some nice paints to replace a few I didn't like, plus get some colours I thought would help with painting Mylo, and some brushes I discovered I needed the other day... and went a bit overboard.

I bought:
10 tubes of paint
1 bottle of satin varnish (I wanted to see how I liked it compared to the gloss)
4 paint brushes
1 mechanical pencil holder
1 sculpting tool (aka really cheap shawl pin)
1 charcoal pencil
2 8" x 10" x 1.5" canvasses

Everything was 40% off (canvasses were 50% off), I didn't pay PST (a benefit of belonging to the art club), the paints actually scanned lower than the price on the shelf (and then were marked down), and the canvasses actually ended up over 75% off, because they had been mispriced and *then* were marked down... and I still paid $120.

Granted, the paints and brushes will last much more than a single painting, but I definitely don't have to worry about declaring any of my sales income at tax time. (You get to subtract the cost of supplies from what you make... and if you keep declaring a loss, they apparently classify it as a hobby. ;) )

Mylo

Mylo and I had fun together at the art club tonight. When you saw Mylo last, he looked like this:

I wanted to improve the eye, so I wiped off the chalk around the eye to get a better idea of how it looked:

Definitely needs work!

This is the last photo I took of Mylo tonight, as I started to clean up:

However, I decided I should get a *bit* more colour on the body before I stopped for the night, and so he actually ended up a bit farther along than this photo shows.

So that I didn't forget what colours I was using on the fur tonight, I put the tubes together and snapped a quick shot:

(No chewing on the painting... that traffic cone orange has cadmium in it.)

I find it hilarious just how much blue I'm using in Mylo, given he's a rather orangish dog!

I also found it amusing when a newer painter asked why there was so much blue in him (referring to the straight blue parts). He thought Mylo was finished! I still have quite a way to go. :)

Caulking

I hate gross caulk. The stuff in my tub was gross. Plus it was not adhering in places. It looked like the mold was coming through from the back for the most part, and the places that weren't adhering definitely had mold on the backside of the caulk.

So, I bought supplies, fetched my caulking gun from my mom's, and ripped out the old caulk. (Yes, I probably *could* have asked my caretaker to do it... but then it wouldn't be done on a schedule convenient to *me*, and I wasn't confident he'd do a decent job, given the muck-up of the previous caulking.)

For some reason, there was large quantities of *sand* behind the tub surround:

(In this spot it was clean sand, in other places it was black and muddy.)

After cleaning out what I could, I made a paste of borax, packed it in everywhere, and let it dry. Then I washed it off, and let everything dry again.

I had bought some tub surround adhesive to reattach the loose portions of the surround, and rigged a method to get the adhesive behind the surround:

Unfortunately, squishing adhesive behind the surround appeared to have *no* effect. (I suspect whatever backing board *might* have been there once was now the sand I had swept out.)

The caulking gun also had problems when I tried to apply the adhesive:

I don't know if you can tell from the photo, but the handle goes all wavy back by the pin... basically it crumpled. (WTF?!? This is the first time *I* used my caulking gun! Did I break it? Or did it get messed up when my uncles borrowed it this past summer? It certainly worked fine for the first pull, it was the second that it ceased to work.) Well, since I still had the whole tub to caulk, and I want to have a shower tomorrow, I found a way to fix it: vice grips and various devices to "unmash" it, then a piece of wood to reinforce the handle:



We can't forget the duct tape, to hold everything in place. Much better!

Another disaster when I took down my clothes-drying (aka shower curtain) rod from over the centre of the tub:

Yup, it stuck to the wall. On one side, the rubber piece is still stuck to the wall, on this side the wall stuck to the rubber. Curses. I'll have to patch that, or my caretaker will have a fit. (I wish my landlord had given me some of the leftover paint like I had asked!)

Since the adhesive wasn't doing squat, I ignored it's curing time. I braced the sides of the surround as best I could, and caulked everything:

It is definitely *not* my best caulking job... but it was hard to work around the braces. :(

This is not too bad:

(There hadn't been *anything* there before.) Yes, I left the bottom open so that any water that did get in there would come out below. I had planned to do stuff to the handle area, but my patience gave out... I'm just going to hope that the caretaker used the correct gaskets and plumbers putty properly. (I did tighten the loose screws as best I could... there wasn't much clearance with the handle.)

I also did the spot behind the kitchen sink faucet:

All that was back there before was plumbers putty, and it was getting mildewy from splashed water.

Now my apartment smells like curing silicone caulk. I've closed the bathroom door now, but I should have closed it earlier. Of course, the smell is just going to come pouring out when I open the door the next time I need to use the washroom. (The question is, can I get away with not using it tonight? I don't think so... perhaps I'll use my respirator for that.) I think I'll crack the window open in my bedroom as well... too bad it wasn't warmer out! (The forecast low tonight is -14 C.) At least it's not as cold as it sometimes is at this time of year!