The Previous Grand Mufti (aka Max Brooks) (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sexualcabinetry) wrote,@ 2008-10-06 13:33:00 |
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Having never worked in a video store, I get a bizarre voyeuristic thrill out of reading Confessions of Porn Store Clerks, but I assume it wouldn't be as funny if I actually did. I guess it's because I have always felt that the best jobs to have are the ones with the most pathetic customers, since it's a real boost for the self-esteem. Naturally, this is a fantasy, and I know Brianna probably has some stories, but my closest experience is in framing.
First off, framing is stupidly expensive. Like any traditional art form with a set and specific group of tools, only a few companies make the equipment. I've worked in three frame shops now, and they are all serviced by two companies: Larson-Juhl, who makes frame moulding, and Bainbridge-Neilsen, who makes mat board. The most difficult to procure pieces of equipment are an ATG tape gun and a pinch-nailer, both of which are available through framing supply firms but otherwise completely unavailable to the general public. Go ask sometime at your Joann's or Michaels for a framing pinch-nailer, and they'll give you a product that looks almost like the industrial pinch-nailer, but complete trash. The truth is, pinch-nailers and ATG guns are items that make custom framing a viable commercial service, and therefore it is just not desirable to sell them to the public. Plastic sealed framing wire is possible to get, but they hide it among floral arrangement supplies, so I'm warning you now never buy anything specifically marked "framing wire". It will rust within two years and destroy your frame, and your only recourse is likely to just get a custom frame job anyway. Over the years I've been able to lift the required tools for myself to be able to frame my own stuff on a small-scale basis, and I'll tell you right now that if you're an artist, learn to paint to store-shelf sizes, such as 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20. You will save yourself thousands of dollars in framing by planning ahead. Also, avoid odd shaped frames like ovals or triangles, stores don't often stock these styles and custom framing that does these shapes is outrageous and hard to find, since in the state of Washington alone, only two shops do them, and they're both in Seattle, both of which charge at bare minimum a $1000 a piece.
As for glass, there are two or three companies that each make a different product for different purposes, such as the high-retail-low-wholesale Masterpiece brand glass, which (really) is worth the extra few bucks you'll pay when getting something professionally framed, as opposed to the less expensive but vastly inferior Conservation brand glass, which looks like shit and will break at the slightest tap. Framing is not terribly difficult to do once you've mastered the basics (remember: an air compressor with a pump nozzle is the most technical piece of equipment you'll need) but the vast majority of human beings are terrified by anything involving the cutting of glass.
Living close to the Cardinal Glass Factory, and hearing daily from my mother who works at Labor and Industries, glass is deadly stuff. People are literally giving themselves internal lung lacerations from microscopic shards of glass they've inhaled while working there, and dying bloody, miserable, brutal deaths that largely go unreported because these folks have likely left employment (Cardinal hires through temp agencies exclusively) sometimes months before the problems begin. Make no mistake, glass is dangerous, and normal people are terrified of the stuff. Properly handled and cut, glass is easy to handle and easier to cut than paper, believe it or not.
The point at hand (sorry, I really like framing), you'd be stupefied by the retarded things people have framed. My most recent four figure sale was a 30x40 blow up of a really shitty digital photo from a cruise ship photographer, pixellized and printer-washed due to lack of ink, framed in a 7 inch face-wide, 4 inch deep, 24 karat gold plated, hand-carved Italian imported moulding, with in-frame electric lighting installed and brass engraved title chip. This came to $4000, in a shop that rarely sees an order go more than $800-$900, even with bells and whistles. This apparently was the last photo of a wife's husband who had died, and grief-stricken (but clearly well-willed) wife had come straight from the funeral home to order this monstrosity in his memory. I could not talk her out of it, she was dead determined to get the gaudiest thing we sell, as a shrine to her late husband, glowing with 2-watt LEDs nightly.
Point the first: Printer ink will simply not last. No matter what quality glass we use, no matter how many UV rays we promise to eliminate, that poster will be a faded pink and blue blob within three years, assuming Madame McDuck keeps the frame in a spot outside of sunlight. Watercolor paintings, which have a viewing life of 50 years total, will be faded within 20 years. There's a museum in London, I forget what it's called, entirely devoted to watercolor, and they have some of the earliest watercolors available, including some really awesome Wyeths, and in order to see them you have to schedule an appointment ahead of time and they drag out each piece from a pitch-black room one at a time. Your measly Inkjet ink won't even last a fraction of that.
Oh, the sin of vanity.
As a watercolor painter myself, I've been working on tackling the fading problem by using acrylics with clarifying medium for the least color-fast colors, the reds and the blues. Watercolor reds are derived from carmine and various rust chemicals bound with gum arabic, one of the main ingredients in Skittles. Next time you're eating Skittles, drop a few of the same color in a small amount of water, wait a few minutes, and you've got a reliable, low cost watercolor paint. The Skittles will be a stark white color after the food coloring and gum arabic have dissolved into the water. When I was studying watercolor (instead of studying oil, as my school had a really strict progression of classes for each study, watercolor having fewer students and therefore was easier for me to get admission into), we had a few assignments to grind our own colors, and I tell you that mixing your own colors is probably the best exercise any artist can do to learn their medium. Watercolor wasn't invented until the discovery of gum arabic, which dissolves easily into water and is the binding medium for the watercolor ingredients. Unfortunately, it doesn't withstand many of the chemicals and minerals that go into oil paints, and so you end up with colors that fade, whereas oil paints do not.
So, acrylics, developed during the Post-War period of industry, have become a godsend to the watercolor artist. They are as fast drying (if not faster) as watercolors, and can be added to a clarifiying medium to provide the additive white see-through of watercoloring. Best of all, it doesn't fade (not that we know of, at least), so my biggest experiments in the past year or so have been subtly replacing watercolor with a low color-fastness with clarified acrylic with high color-fastness. The advantage to this is that the reds and blues of acrylic are far stronger than the reds and blues of watercolor, which leads to some interesting problems and awesome advantages. Most watercolorists tend to paint in a light, often called "feminine" style, avoiding heavy applications of paint that allow the vibrancy of oils. It's interesting times to be a painter, chemistry is changing everything. Georgian painters only had eight colors to work with, Impressionists had about 13, and modern painters can literally call Winsor-Newton, send them a snatch of the color they're looking for, and within a few weeks have a custom built formula for that color.
Also, Winsor-Newton is the best paint you can buy. I have several hundred dollars worth of their product and I've never been dissatisfied. I proudly recommend their products, and they make seriously terrific india ink as well. I'm still experimenting with brushes, so I don't have a brand I recommend there. I do try to stick to the Arches Moulin brand of watercolor paper, but my current experiments are in smooth Strathmore 300 series (Edward Gorey) Bristol, and this really interesting Canson brand Canva-Paper, both of which lead to interesting effects for watercolor. The advantage of Arches Moulin is that it is the toughest paper to withstand the paper-soak method, which involves filling your bathtub with water and letting the paper sit in it for an hour or so. Arches Moulin has been produced for the last 400 years and has something of a cult around it, for good or ill. The downside is that it's ludicrously expensive and overpriced, and requires a little extra know-how due to it's wide grain and eccentric knife-open slicing technique.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
I could talk about art supplies all day. One of my closest friends, Billis Helbig, mixes his own ink with a secret ratio. I haven't asked, to be honest. I wish I was living in a space with a dedicated creation zone so I could get room for a proper scanner set-up.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
From last night's Masquerade game:
I'm playing a Malkavian, named Argus, who showed up to last night's game and loudly declared himself the new Seneschal, which the Lasombra Antitribu Prince laughed and acquiesced to. Argus is definitely one of those slow-burning Malks that appear to be completely normal until the Storyteller taps me on the shoulder and gives me my new cause-celebre. Last night, he told me that had the revelation that the Ventrue are not a clan, and therefore are not qualified to possess a Primogen.
The Prince, deferring to his new Seneschal who thus far hadn't betrayed him (and I really don't think he will, Argus is a hard-line Camarillist), promptly revoked the Ventrue Primogen's seat, and I think it was the Lasombra in him happily looking for an excuse. Argus held a Powerpoint Presentation on the matter.
SLIDE ONE: "The Ventrue are not a clan."
SLIDE TWO: "The Ventrue are not a clan."
SLIDE THREE: HLUGALUGALUGHLUGHGLUALALALUGH.
We're playing a Year of Fire game and the Red Star just popped in the sky, so the Salubri loudly stepped into town. I never thought I'd say this, but I love John Warner. I really, really do. It's been too long since I've played with the guy. Whatever he is, he certainly isn't boring, and it's awesome playing in the "No Dudley McDursleys Club". 30 players, more than the current Olympia Cam, and now fucking McGrath or Redmon to deal with. It's fucking sweet. The group is actively working together to keep characters from needing to backstab each other just for the hell of it, and I have (honestly, believe or not) never played a Malkavian before. I played a Malkovian Ventrue, but this is a whole different beast.
Jeepers, I'm high today.
First off, framing is stupidly expensive. Like any traditional art form with a set and specific group of tools, only a few companies make the equipment. I've worked in three frame shops now, and they are all serviced by two companies: Larson-Juhl, who makes frame moulding, and Bainbridge-Neilsen, who makes mat board. The most difficult to procure pieces of equipment are an ATG tape gun and a pinch-nailer, both of which are available through framing supply firms but otherwise completely unavailable to the general public. Go ask sometime at your Joann's or Michaels for a framing pinch-nailer, and they'll give you a product that looks almost like the industrial pinch-nailer, but complete trash. The truth is, pinch-nailers and ATG guns are items that make custom framing a viable commercial service, and therefore it is just not desirable to sell them to the public. Plastic sealed framing wire is possible to get, but they hide it among floral arrangement supplies, so I'm warning you now never buy anything specifically marked "framing wire". It will rust within two years and destroy your frame, and your only recourse is likely to just get a custom frame job anyway. Over the years I've been able to lift the required tools for myself to be able to frame my own stuff on a small-scale basis, and I'll tell you right now that if you're an artist, learn to paint to store-shelf sizes, such as 8x10, 11x14 and 16x20. You will save yourself thousands of dollars in framing by planning ahead. Also, avoid odd shaped frames like ovals or triangles, stores don't often stock these styles and custom framing that does these shapes is outrageous and hard to find, since in the state of Washington alone, only two shops do them, and they're both in Seattle, both of which charge at bare minimum a $1000 a piece.
As for glass, there are two or three companies that each make a different product for different purposes, such as the high-retail-low-wholesale Masterpiece brand glass, which (really) is worth the extra few bucks you'll pay when getting something professionally framed, as opposed to the less expensive but vastly inferior Conservation brand glass, which looks like shit and will break at the slightest tap. Framing is not terribly difficult to do once you've mastered the basics (remember: an air compressor with a pump nozzle is the most technical piece of equipment you'll need) but the vast majority of human beings are terrified by anything involving the cutting of glass.
Living close to the Cardinal Glass Factory, and hearing daily from my mother who works at Labor and Industries, glass is deadly stuff. People are literally giving themselves internal lung lacerations from microscopic shards of glass they've inhaled while working there, and dying bloody, miserable, brutal deaths that largely go unreported because these folks have likely left employment (Cardinal hires through temp agencies exclusively) sometimes months before the problems begin. Make no mistake, glass is dangerous, and normal people are terrified of the stuff. Properly handled and cut, glass is easy to handle and easier to cut than paper, believe it or not.
The point at hand (sorry, I really like framing), you'd be stupefied by the retarded things people have framed. My most recent four figure sale was a 30x40 blow up of a really shitty digital photo from a cruise ship photographer, pixellized and printer-washed due to lack of ink, framed in a 7 inch face-wide, 4 inch deep, 24 karat gold plated, hand-carved Italian imported moulding, with in-frame electric lighting installed and brass engraved title chip. This came to $4000, in a shop that rarely sees an order go more than $800-$900, even with bells and whistles. This apparently was the last photo of a wife's husband who had died, and grief-stricken (but clearly well-willed) wife had come straight from the funeral home to order this monstrosity in his memory. I could not talk her out of it, she was dead determined to get the gaudiest thing we sell, as a shrine to her late husband, glowing with 2-watt LEDs nightly.
Point the first: Printer ink will simply not last. No matter what quality glass we use, no matter how many UV rays we promise to eliminate, that poster will be a faded pink and blue blob within three years, assuming Madame McDuck keeps the frame in a spot outside of sunlight. Watercolor paintings, which have a viewing life of 50 years total, will be faded within 20 years. There's a museum in London, I forget what it's called, entirely devoted to watercolor, and they have some of the earliest watercolors available, including some really awesome Wyeths, and in order to see them you have to schedule an appointment ahead of time and they drag out each piece from a pitch-black room one at a time. Your measly Inkjet ink won't even last a fraction of that.
Oh, the sin of vanity.
As a watercolor painter myself, I've been working on tackling the fading problem by using acrylics with clarifying medium for the least color-fast colors, the reds and the blues. Watercolor reds are derived from carmine and various rust chemicals bound with gum arabic, one of the main ingredients in Skittles. Next time you're eating Skittles, drop a few of the same color in a small amount of water, wait a few minutes, and you've got a reliable, low cost watercolor paint. The Skittles will be a stark white color after the food coloring and gum arabic have dissolved into the water. When I was studying watercolor (instead of studying oil, as my school had a really strict progression of classes for each study, watercolor having fewer students and therefore was easier for me to get admission into), we had a few assignments to grind our own colors, and I tell you that mixing your own colors is probably the best exercise any artist can do to learn their medium. Watercolor wasn't invented until the discovery of gum arabic, which dissolves easily into water and is the binding medium for the watercolor ingredients. Unfortunately, it doesn't withstand many of the chemicals and minerals that go into oil paints, and so you end up with colors that fade, whereas oil paints do not.
So, acrylics, developed during the Post-War period of industry, have become a godsend to the watercolor artist. They are as fast drying (if not faster) as watercolors, and can be added to a clarifiying medium to provide the additive white see-through of watercoloring. Best of all, it doesn't fade (not that we know of, at least), so my biggest experiments in the past year or so have been subtly replacing watercolor with a low color-fastness with clarified acrylic with high color-fastness. The advantage to this is that the reds and blues of acrylic are far stronger than the reds and blues of watercolor, which leads to some interesting problems and awesome advantages. Most watercolorists tend to paint in a light, often called "feminine" style, avoiding heavy applications of paint that allow the vibrancy of oils. It's interesting times to be a painter, chemistry is changing everything. Georgian painters only had eight colors to work with, Impressionists had about 13, and modern painters can literally call Winsor-Newton, send them a snatch of the color they're looking for, and within a few weeks have a custom built formula for that color.
Also, Winsor-Newton is the best paint you can buy. I have several hundred dollars worth of their product and I've never been dissatisfied. I proudly recommend their products, and they make seriously terrific india ink as well. I'm still experimenting with brushes, so I don't have a brand I recommend there. I do try to stick to the Arches Moulin brand of watercolor paper, but my current experiments are in smooth Strathmore 300 series (Edward Gorey) Bristol, and this really interesting Canson brand Canva-Paper, both of which lead to interesting effects for watercolor. The advantage of Arches Moulin is that it is the toughest paper to withstand the paper-soak method, which involves filling your bathtub with water and letting the paper sit in it for an hour or so. Arches Moulin has been produced for the last 400 years and has something of a cult around it, for good or ill. The downside is that it's ludicrously expensive and overpriced, and requires a little extra know-how due to it's wide grain and eccentric knife-open slicing technique.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
I could talk about art supplies all day. One of my closest friends, Billis Helbig, mixes his own ink with a secret ratio. I haven't asked, to be honest. I wish I was living in a space with a dedicated creation zone so I could get room for a proper scanner set-up.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
From last night's Masquerade game:
I'm playing a Malkavian, named Argus, who showed up to last night's game and loudly declared himself the new Seneschal, which the Lasombra Antitribu Prince laughed and acquiesced to. Argus is definitely one of those slow-burning Malks that appear to be completely normal until the Storyteller taps me on the shoulder and gives me my new cause-celebre. Last night, he told me that had the revelation that the Ventrue are not a clan, and therefore are not qualified to possess a Primogen.
The Prince, deferring to his new Seneschal who thus far hadn't betrayed him (and I really don't think he will, Argus is a hard-line Camarillist), promptly revoked the Ventrue Primogen's seat, and I think it was the Lasombra in him happily looking for an excuse. Argus held a Powerpoint Presentation on the matter.
SLIDE ONE: "The Ventrue are not a clan."
SLIDE TWO: "The Ventrue are not a clan."
SLIDE THREE: HLUGALUGALUGHLUGHGLUALALALUGH.
We're playing a Year of Fire game and the Red Star just popped in the sky, so the Salubri loudly stepped into town. I never thought I'd say this, but I love John Warner. I really, really do. It's been too long since I've played with the guy. Whatever he is, he certainly isn't boring, and it's awesome playing in the "No Dudley McDursleys Club". 30 players, more than the current Olympia Cam, and now fucking McGrath or Redmon to deal with. It's fucking sweet. The group is actively working together to keep characters from needing to backstab each other just for the hell of it, and I have (honestly, believe or not) never played a Malkavian before. I played a Malkovian Ventrue, but this is a whole different beast.
Jeepers, I'm high today.
