A busy night last night at the Red Cow Open Mic. I elected to play two tracks from Cycles, as this is technically my latest release (although We Robot is the latest original release of course, and I've even had A Walk In The Countryside in-between).
Cycles III went well enough, but I was unhappy with Cycles V, mainly because I hadn't decided to play it at all until only a couple of hours before the performance. I had little time to rehearse, but was confident I could breeze though it from memory. I did not; although the result was a passable imitation! I berated myself for this. The insecurity of what to perform was the problem. I should have either firmly decided, or if not, decided to try something improvisational from the outset, or just not played anything. I used to relish jumping straight in to improvising at the Mash events, but now I prefer a rehearsed and polished performance.
At the end of the night, Nigel requested a future replay of Robot, as enjoyed by many on the opening night, so I'll perform that next time with another We Robot track. I don't particularly like the idea of playing the same thing twice (how easily I am bored! - though my main reason for preferring new things is that it increases the learning potential, the experience gamut) and I had aimed to play something new, yet I realised that this was my first ever 'request', and what a delight and honour such a thing was!
For the first time I noted the full list of acts and songs, and there were a few first-time comers to this night, if old hands at performing including J.D. (John Darlington) and Jonathan Tarplee.
Today, a full day working on the Ly2 mural design. There are 12 'boards' to make, each 80cm square. These begin a simple noughts-and-crosses boards, but start to become more complex, with equilateral triangles, hexagons, and circles.
Applying these to a 12M section of wall is not a trivial task. Each grid line needs to be geometrically accurate. Simple enough for a grid of squares (though even then, this requires exact measurement) but more complex for triangles and hexes. The wall isn't level either, like real-world walls never are.
My plan is to initially divide the wall using verticals, then draw up the 12 80x80cm squares. Once at that stage, I'll use horizontal and vertical strips of paper with the exact grid measurement pre-drawn on, then join those lines up. This way I can quickly draw a complex grid on the wall without the need to measure it there and then.
So, today, I drew out those strips; four per grid (top, bottom, left, right), so 48 paper strips with exact measurements for the intersection points of each vertex:
As you might see, the hexagon grid has 5mm gaps between hexes, which is easy to work out for the flat sides, but the horizontal spacing needed to be calculated to match.
These grid marks are now complete. The next step is to cut lots of squares, triangles, hexes and other shapes from sticky-backed plastic to use as a mask. A lot of squares are needed: 112 squares alone, plus 32 triangles and over 70 hexagons. The circles need external masks too, and I'll probably need more for things like edges, and the final 'bee' design.
Lidl were selling some plastic film with an image of bricks on as sort of cheap wallpaper. I bought some for this project and it seems to be ideal. Normally this plastic is expensive stuff, but this is cheap, thin, and not very sticky. It's better as a paint masking film than for its intended purpose!
This preparation work should pay off on the day (or two...) of painting, though it will need to be applied with care and military precision.
I'll do more mask-making tomorrow and hope that one roll will be enough.
