A slower day today, less anxious than yesterday. I'm starting to reorganise and plan several larger ideas. Tip: if a job isn't getting done, then make its steps smaller and smaller until the first one is very easy.
I stained the frame I cut and glued yesterday. The best stain is Morrell's solvent based wood stain, as good as the old Colron stain used to be before it became water based and very poor. One problem with solvent based stain is that it shows up PVA wood glue. The glue is normally transparent but even the tiniest speck appears as very dark spots when stained, almost always near the corners or gluey bits, but impossible to prevent because the glue is completely invisible until stained and even the most ardent wiping won't remove it all. Today I decided to try to fix this by removing the glue after staining using a 1:1 mix of isopropyl alcohol and water and cotton buds, taking time. This worked fastastically, far better than I could have hoped. The stain was removed too, of course, but when some stain was repainted, rubbed, over the lighter areas they covered so well that the patches were fixed perfectly.
I've made a lot of these plain wood stained frames over the years. Later on I started to distress the wood or add other decoration, but for years this plain brown ('Jacobean Dark Oak' - like a raw umber pigment) was my main style of frame. Of all of those frames, this one I've made today is probably my best. If only I can keep improving.
All of this took far too many hours, but its absorbing activity made the day restful if not very productive. After this I drew out the underdraing to Volcanism and Social Media, a complex painting in the mould of my 'Wax Cataclysm' or 'The Bully' paintings. I've not made a digital mockup; I used to do that but now I often just hand draw it and use photo references as inexact guides to forms and textures while I paint, this way I can paint a mountain or body in a shape that I haven't got an exact photo of... I realised that I didn't need an exact object to copy from. This one will take a few days to paint, when I begin.
I'll finish the drawing and transfer it over tomorrow, then back to music perhaps.
