Not What I Said was Next, but here is some stuff

Non-Costume Related…

So, my daughter and I did not get around to Part 2 of her T-shirt screen printing yet. We did other stuff yesterday, which is cool.

We started with a typical lazy Sunday morning, watched some cartoons, she did some reading while I did some sundry domestic duties and costume design tweaking. Squeezed in some time on the treadmill, because heaven forbid I let my the calf muscle that’s been sore recently completely heal.

Once the GF was up, we headed out for brunch at a way-too-popular place where we had to wait for 45 minutes. I joked that the food better have miraculous properties to make it worth that wait. It did not, but it was pretty good.

We came home and all went our separate ways for a bit. I was sleepy but avoided a nap, knowing I would never recover.

My little girl went to her room, and I could hear her singing (turns out she was writing a song, which she later sang for me), and I was content that she was content. Well, can one be content while guilty? I was thinking I should take her out to the pool or something to enjoy the sunshine. But I was sooo sleepy…

I did rouse myself to do some more stuff around the house, and she did ask to go to the pool. So we headed out at what I thought was a late time in the afternoon, and found the pool populated mainly by just a few young adult sun bathers. We had the pool to ourselves for a while, then I got out, and was just getting K ready to leave when a bunch of kids started showing up.

She looked at me pleadingly, and so of course we stayed so she could play with the other kids in the pool for a while. Once we got hungry, we headed home, surprised at how long we had ended up staying. I was glad she had gotten some playmates besides me. I’m fun enough, I suppose, but it’s not the same. And I’m only good for about a half hour of playtime in the pool, tops.

We wound down the evening with pizza (frozen but good, especially the way food tastes good after you’ve been swimming for a while), a bit of video gaming, reading, getting stuff ready for Monday morning… It was one of those exhaustingly good days, and I slept through the night without waking up once, which is unusual for me.

Costume Stuff

So, I’ve done some minor tweaking to the Ditko design, and I have come to embrace it, especially after I modified the way I did the half-tone “retro comic color” look. I also tweaked the chest spider, made it’s legs more “surprised” in their configuration:

Now I am going to play with separating out the mask, gloves, boots, pants, and shirts in the pattern. I’m not totally convinced I can get it to a place where I feel confident about paying for printing it. I mean, it’s kind of like flying blind, in some ways, reconfiguring a pattern someone else designed… We’ll see. But if nothing else, I can have it printed with the sewing pattern “as is” and it will still be cool.

I also find myself doing a lot of patterning in my head (especially while I sat by the pool watching K play) regarding sewing a Spidey-shirt out of two different colors of spandex to get the basic color layout and then using a fabric marker to add the web lines… I don’t know. I need to focus my costume efforts, largely for financial reasons, but I can’t get that fully DIY costume out of my head…

And now…off to Monday!

The Weekend: Head Cold, Flat Tire, Dad’s Day, etc.

“How was your weekend?”

The usual Monday question. Politely answered with something like “Good. How was yours?” Or if it’s someone you think actually cares, you might give a more specific and honest answer. “Eh. I’ve had better,” or “It was so awesome I can’t remember!” (I sometimes forget what I did over the weekend, but because it was so forgettable.)

Anyway, as I was going to sleep last night, I thought, “how was this weekend?”

My first instinct was “It was bad.” I’ve had a stupid head cold since Thursday/Friday, it was hot and humid, I had to change a flat tire, we spent the first half of Sunday cleaning the apartment…

But then I realized that it didn’t feel like it was a bad weekend, in spite of that list of facts.

I was home with my daughter on Friday, and we saw a great movie, and swam (because I was still minimizing my sinus issues at the time) and had fun. We had an adventurous meal out that night, witnessing the drunken revelry of a neighboring table, which is pretty funny in retrospect.

Saturday–other than the “quick” trip for lunch and a necessary grocery trip that started off with the aforementioned flat tire–we hung around the house, did this and that.

I told my daughter I just didn’t feel well enough to go to the pool or do much else, and she said she was fine with hanging around the house. She might have meant it, or she might have just been telling me that to make me feel better. Either way, I was very grateful.

Sunday, I was feeling a bit better–which is good, since we really needed to clean the apartment. And as much as I didn’t really want to clean, it always feels good to get it done. My daughter even made good efforts at cleaning her room. It still needs work, but considering that asking her to clean usually results in her near-collapse with a sudden case of “I don’t feel good,” I was quite pleased with her efforts.

After cleaning and lunch, we went to the mall for coffee/snacks and wandering, then to the library for a book for her to read, and then to the art store for a larger screen printing frame and some fabric paint. Home for a bit, then out to eat so I could be treated to my dad’s day meal.

Then back home for K to paint an old shirt with her new fabric paint. While she did that, my GF read, and I worked on radically reorganizing my office closet to serve as a space for drying and storing my screen printing frames (no small task)….

Anyway, my point is… It was a good weekend. It would be easy to list those bad aspects of it and say it was bad. But the little, mundane, run-of-the-mill stuff that comprised it…it all just added up to something very unexpectedly pleasing.

So, how was my weekend? Good, thank you. How was yours?

 

Swimming, Eating out, Revamped Mask Pattern & Screen Prep

Cleaned. Now drying. Exciting Stuff.

Oooh. Mysterious. And quilty.

Movie Day: How to Train Your Dragon 2 !!

Yesterday was a good day, but a busy day. It was my daughter’s first day out of school for the summer, and her summer camp doesn’t start until Monday, so yesterday was a day at home. I did some work-from-home stuff in the morning, and then she and I headed out to see “How to Train Your Dragon 2.” I LOVE those movies. (Even more than my daughter does, actually.) This one was as good as the original. Well done, and pretty powerful stuff, I think.

Pool Time!

After coming back from the movie and resting a bit, my daughter talked me into taking her to the pool. I’ve got some kind of allergy/sinus thing going on, so I was really hoping for the predicted thunderstorms to prevent a pool visit, but no such luck.

We headed over to the pool, and my plan was to sit under an umbrella with a box of tissues while K swam. Even when I’m feeling good, I need the water to be perfect before I’ll get in, and I was sure it would be too cold for me this early in the summer.

But with my girl urging me to get in, I stuck a toe in the water, just to check, and would you believe it wasn’t bad? I actually forgot about my allergies for a while as we played and swam. I was sure to tell her that I was glad she dragged me to the pool, and she was nice enough not to say “I told you so.” At least, not outright. It was definitely implied.

Ahh, the Joys of Observing Public Drunkenness…

After my girlfriend came home from work, we all headed out to eat at one of our go-to restaurants, a sports pub type place. We don’t really watch sports (on account of me hating them and all; my girlfriend is more likely to watch than I am), but there are a few sports pub type places around here that are worth the noise and sports just for the food.

There was a table full of guys and gals next to us who were I think about 19 going on 12. One girl in particular was talking–no, pretty much yelling in a high-pitched voice much of the time, dropping F-bombs like crazy. My daughter, good girl that she is, covered her ears. But I think that was as much due to the noise as the cursing.

In any case, I figure it was a good way to deter her from someday going out and making a drunken fool of herself.

But at least they were having fun. Or something.

Cleanliness & Messiness

Once we got home, I was determined to get a start on screen printing steps. Step 1 was “clean the screen.” I did that, and set it down to dry, not thinking I would touch it again until the morning. But then I decided I wanted to go ahead and apply the photo emulsion, so that it could dry overnight in the dark.

As I have likely said before, there’s a reason I do most of my creative stuff digitally. Doing artsy stuff “in real life” is so messy and imprecise. Applying the photo emulsion to the screen always sounded so easy and straightforward in instructions.

But I did it, for better or worse, and covered the whole affair with a well-sealed and light-shielded cardboard box (and added a quilt this morning to avoid any light leakage from my office lamp and the sun through the window).

Once the household is awake, I can start being noisy enough to print out a transparency of the chest emblem screen design and make an attempt at exposing the screen. I’m a bit worried about whether I got the layers of emulsion thick and even enough. But that’s what testing is for, I guess.

I was relieved to discover that I can actually clean the emulsion of the screen completely and start over if need be. I had thought it was automatically a permanent thing. You can choose to leave an exposed screen as is, if you want that pattern/stencil for re-use. But otherwise you can wash out the emulsion. Nice.

Redesigned Mask Pattern

Front

Back

This made a lot more sense once I converted to the actual shape and curvature of the mask in flattened/stretched form. I adjusted the front webs, and then added a new layer to my file to draw the back webs superimposed over the front webs, and then moved those back webs to a separate file and yada yada. This should come out pretty well, I do believe. We’ll see.

Today should be a quieter day. A quiet morning at home, at least, before we do much else. So hopefully I can at least expose my first screen!

Up Next: Getting Some Screen Time