So the main accomplishment of this week was to photograph the UWS sculpture. The 4am wake up for dawn photography was pretty brutal, but the pics were worth it.

Another part of this week was spent on getting together the specifications for a bunch of printing projects, which is a part of my ArtStart year. I’ve found a printer who seems to be able to function as a print on demand provider – something I’ve been looking for locally.

Continuing on the comics theme, I’ve been looking at the idea of splitting Surfing The Deathline #4 into #4 & #5. This has involved adding a few pages, so I’ve been sketching the pages using ProCreate and the Jot Touch on my iPad. It’s a pretty amazing drawing experience.

The week closed with more photography – the March In May protests in Sydney.

It’s been a quiet week largely spent recovering from making the UWS piece, letting my shredded hands and forearms heal, cleaning the studio, packing away the welding gear, and getting the drawing equipment ready.

One annoyance was the need to replace my modem / router / VOIP box, after the VOIP function up and died on me a month or so back, leaving me without any landline phone. The new modem seems to be pretty nice. It syncs at a higher speed than the old one at least.

The major bit of writing I did this week was to get together a guide to producing and selling EPUB comics, specifically within the context of the iTunes store.

With just 6 weeks left to go on my ArtStart Grant, it’s time I started thinking about what comes after. Hopefully the next grant I’ve applied for will come through, otherwise there’s some serious questions to be asked about how I can go ahead with Sculpture By The Sea. Over the next few weeks I need to:

• Organise a print on demand provider for all of my photo books
• Organise a print on demand provider for my comics
• Produce EPUB versions of Surfing The Deathline 1, 2 & 3.
• Draw Surfing The Deathline 4.

It’s quite an ambitious schedule, but assuming nothing else comes up, it should be doable.

This week saw the bumpin of the UWS sculpture. A pretty momentous event. It was the first time I’d hired a ute, and done the whole thing myself, without a professional mover involved.

The whole process was remarkably trouble free. The whole task took around 3 days. First bringing the sculpture to site, and situating it in place, then returning the next day to add the leaves, then a third day to add a leaf that had come home for repairs. Here’s hoping the work sells.

Everything is finished. Hard to imagine, but working up to the last minute, everything was ready. There were some hiccups with getting the branches connected after braiding, but I eventually discovered a way of connecting them that avoided actually cutting the braid. The first wrap up of the braid around the branches didn’t quite work out the way I wanted, and ended up with big knots over the joins. So, I unwrapped and re-wrapped, creating a much leaner, smoother appearance.

Work continues on the UWS piece. It’s hard work, slow work, hot work and dusty work, but it feels like it’s coming together. The branches are being attached and the skin is going on. It requires significant precision, without much room for error. With luck, the final two branches will go on Tuesday, and that’s the serious work out of the way.

Longer diary entries will be along once this major work is out of the way.

A week of travel and deal doing.

So in going to get my stainless steel on Monday, I hit upon an idea to call the makers of a welder I’d been thinking about a year or so back. I spoke to the owner of the company, ad he mentioned a model that wasn’t on their website, their crappy un-updated website. Hello. So I suggested that perhaps he’d consider a swap – a new website for a welding machine.

So, on Tuesday I went out to their head office, and picked up the welding machine, and since it was near UWS, made a quick site visit. Wednesday it was off to New Zealand, where I visited Gibbs Farm.

This was a real pilgrimage – being able to stand next to, and touch giant works by Anish Kapoor & Richard Serra.

The other two days there ere spent doing touristy stuff – walking around Auckland, and taking ferry tours.

Sunday was dedicated to getting the electrical supplies necessary to get the welder up and running. All going well, I should be able to begin next week.

Disaster!

The armature I was building for the top half of the UWS piece has turned out to be a failure. The material wasn’t up to the weight demands, and sagged to the point it wasn’t viable.

So, with 3 weeks to go, one of which will have 4 days going to New Zealand and back, I’ve got to find another solution. I’m thinking it’s going to be stainless steel pipe, cut with lots of slots, then bent and welded. back together.

I’ve priced a small welder that’ll run off domestic house power, and which should do the job. So in the 2 days before I go away, I’ve got to get stainless steel organised, get a welder organised and gear up for a new and expensive addition to my practice.

Argh.

The base of my UWS sculpture is complete, and the new, responsive version of my website has gone live.

The other news is that my second review has gone up, this time for the Adonit Jot Touch 4.

Work, work, work this week. I picked up the stainless braid, but apart from that, it’s been nose to the grindstone on the UWS sculpture. Progress is painfully slow – there’s lots of measuring, testing, planning and fitting. Because there’s lots of overlapping, nothing can be locked down, so I’m having to peel multiple pieces back in order to put in new support infrastructures for each new piece. That said, the work is coming along well, and the base should be complete in the next week.

I ordered a new pen for my Wacom tablet, after my old pen developed a cracked barrel. The choice was a Wacom Airbrush pen. Unfortunately, the unit that arrived was mediocre. The whole internals were insufficiently connected to the pen body, so that when you press the eraser, the nib popped out by 1mm, and then when you press down on the nib, you could feel it pop back in.

Needless to say, I returned it, and now I’m waiting for them to send a replacement.

…in a row?

So this week, the green side of the UWS piece has been mounted to the completed armature, which has been painted black to make it less visible through gaps between the plates of the work. The attachment method I worked out was successful, but required a lot of drilling through metal. Since my drill bits had all become blunt, and drilling through metal is a mountain of effort, I dropped in to bunnings and picked up a couple of nifty things. Firstly, a drill sharpener – this is a marvel. It’s got a pair of grinding wheels driven by the drill itself, and then an attachment you put the bit into, which locates it against the grinding wheel. As you twist the attachment, the bit gets sharpened. It’s stunningly effective.

The other thing I picked up was a drill press. I’ve wanted one of these for ages, and they’re available for under a hundred bucks. So in the studio I’ve now got the Dremel, drill press, a cordless drill set up as a driver, another set up with a long socket extension, and an angle-grinder. Fun times.

The BIG news of the week, is I managed to secure a materials sponsorship for the work. The sponsor is the provider of the stainless steel hosepipe, who have been kind enough to give me all the stuff for free! This is an amazing development as it was expected to be a major cost in constructing the work. Fun, fun times.