Tag Archives: DIY

fish on an old shutter

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A few years ago I’d sold a painting of fish on old slabs of timber to a friend. Fast forward a few years and someone who’d seen it wanted something similar.

Of course, its not so simple just ordering a painting on old timber, an old shutter or door. FIRST you have to FIND it. Which means looking at every rubbish pile you walk or drive by anywhere you go. Sorting through stacks of old wood wherever you see one, searching for something suitable.

Remember, I no longer have sheds where I can store every potential piece of rubbish wood I find…

Once you locate the right piece, you have to carry it home, then prepare it – wash and clean off dirt or whatever might have accumulated on it, sand off the worse weathering and layers of old paint, cut off any rotted or jagged bits it might have, mend where needed, and generally prepare the surface for painting.

Then paint it. Last finish with varnish and some method for hanging it.

Don’t get me wrong. This is right up my alley. I love doing this stuff. I just wish I had the luxury of the multiple sheds I had in Tasmania to store my stash of future projects. Back then I could pick up anything I thought would ‘come in handy one day’, so that when I had a commission (or an idea) I could just walk around the sheds looking for the right piece…

Those were the days…

Do you detect a note of nostalgia in my voice typing? Yes, you do. ‘Cause lately I’ve been thinking about Australia more and more and miss it more and more.

sigh.

Anyway. Enjoy some fish.

Here is the finished piece, sitting on my workbench outside cause I have no space to hang it.

z

hanging racks for kid’s rooms

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A while ago I made a couple of ‘coat racks’ for a friend’s grand daughters. I’m not sure I shared them then, so I’m sharing them now. Basically I can’t find any posts about them so if i have shared them, oh well… I mean, it would help if I remembered what I called the post… but here they are anyway. Again. Maybe.

I started with 2 drawers made to fit inside pallets turned into coffee tables or couches which I found in a hardware store in Athens. They were pretty plainly finished so I sanded them and filled nail holes. They also had a large hole to be used as a drawer pull. I found a large cork to plug the hole figuring it could be used to hang something off.

I painted them in shades of pink, and found a strip of timber to put along the front to make the box able to hold things like a tablet, a book, mittens, whatever.

I decorated them with cartoons of cute animals holding balloons. I also added double hooks underneath for hanging coats and scarves and backpacks. Here are photos before I added the girl’s names on the ‘rail’.

Well, my friend’s daughter had a boy as well! So another coat rack wall hanging thingy was needed.

This time the place I bought the pallet drawers no longer had them, so I had to find another way to make it.

Luckily I am still a little bit of a collector of ‘things that will come in useful one day’. Not as much as I was in Australia, cause I no longer have the space, but I had managed to find and keep two boxes which fit the bill.

I chose one of them, sanded back the old paint, filled cracks and gaps with wood filler, and painted it light blue. Then I found a strip of timber I could use for the ‘rail’ and added that. I also found a knob to put on the side for holding a scarf or something.

I went with an astronaut theme, thinking it might appeal to a little boy. It was that, cowboys or monsters… Anyway, the knob I’d found was a star so I went with astronauts.

Here is a close=up of the drawings on that one.

Unfortunately its been packed up to go to the Netherlands so I can’t take a better photo. This one was fine till I did something stupid and cropped it accidentally. And promptly saved over the only copy I had.

Don’t you hate it when things like that happen?

I’ve been moving files from the phone to the laptop to external drives, backing up files and generally trying to sort and organise all my photos into folders and subfolders so I never lose things again (like I did a few years ago when my old computer hard drive got corrupted). But its a never ending job and sometimes I’m sure I mistakenly toss out a folder I didn’t plan to.

Ugh.

Anyway, me and my scattered brain are going now.

Hope this might have inspired someone to do something similar for a child.

z

a quickie experimental work

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Thought I’d share a quickie work I framed the other day. I say ‘quickie’ even though it was weeks in the making… mainly cause I had no idea what I was going to do.

Firstly, I glued an old, yellowed book page from a stack of throw away books I’d collected to a sheet of cartridge paper to create a background to work on like I did here, then I left it for ages, sitting on the kitchen table among the hundreds of things I was going to get to ‘soon’…

While working on one of my large paintings I decided to experiment with the texture building paste I’d bought, so I mixed up some paint and applied it to the paper, thinking I would do a small painting of a wall and stairs. I let it dry and as I looked at it, I felt totally uninspired to continue, so I let it sit and think about its sins a little longer.

Thing was, the more I looked at it. the more I liked the simplicity of the colours on the background and didn’t want to make it into anything other than a background.

Sometime during that period, I saw a FB post about a guy who created art by doing backgrounds then whacking paint covered sticks and branches onto his canvases. Hm… This was only small so I couldn’t go whacking the hell out of it… but I could try pressing something onto it… that might work.

And that’s what I did. Since it was a neutral background, I wanted to do something to bring it to life. I had some of those fuzzy dried flower arrangement things from other projects, so I chose my colours, et viola!

I used the same ‘flower’ to print the image in 3 different colours and I liked it. It’s like nothing I’ve ever done before, but I was pleased.

I had a small frame that fit the work, and I had flat white spray paint, so I sprayed the frame, gave it a bit of rub in spots where the paint hadn’t gone on well, and there it is.

At this point comes the warning/disclaimer. When doing spray painting at home, don’t pull the cap off the spray paint with a vice grip and the determination of a fat man going after the last chip at the family dinner table. I pulled it off (they do like to make them almost impossible to pull off!) and pulled off the spray nozzle at the same time. Putting the nozzle back on caused all kinds of grief as you can see.

But hey, it’s pretty normal for me to have paint all over my hands, my clothes, my shoes… no one expects anything less.

You might notice a bandage on one finger…? I got that while rummaging through a toolbox to find a screwdriver. Instead, I found a razor paint scraper (the kind you use on glass) without its protective cover.

Let that be a lesson as well.

z