Well I think I have found the perfect hobby for this year: soap carving for Covid-19 safe practice! Constant hand washing is built-in to this activity; even with dry soap you need to wash and wash before touching anything else!

I have a few extra large bars of soap purchased some time ago for this purpose, and one carving almost completed when I set is aside last year. It is cheap and quite nice to work with, if you can take the rather strong scent added to this soap! The soap chips do get all over, and could be a bit slippery if damp, but they are not sharp or toxic!

My plan is to cast the carved soap using silicone. This should work pretty well for simple molds using poured silicone. However I don’t even know if I will be able to make a brush on silicone product work directly on the soap. But if not, I will spray a matte clear acrylic over the soap, which should create a better surface. I really hope this works out, as my little figure is not suitable for a poured silicone mold.

The new carving will be another scarab beetle: a friend for Mrs. Beetle casts from my carved alabaster original. Carving alabaster was fun, but much trickier. The piece I was carving was very fragile, full of veins!

So I highly recommend soap carving for Covid-19 safe practice, and for fun. And I hope to be able to recommend it for productive artistic creation also.

The first photo shows three turtles from the mold. I carved the original turtle from a soft (conglomerate stone?) tile, thinking to give it to my youngest granddaughter. But of course a stone tile is not a great idea for a 3 year old; it is a bit heavy and too fragile for a young child! The head & limbs could chip and break off very easily if dropped. So I made a cheap silicone caulk mold, in order to reproduce my low relief carving in a more suitable material.

Now there are several six inch long turtles from the mold, and there will soon be a few more. My granddaughter got the first one in a package last week, along with two more scarab beetles. She was happy, but I don’t think she needs more turtles at the moment. So with the texture and paint, I am enjoying these myself. I imagine there may be a larger artwork with turtles at some point.

I foiled this photo of Mrs. Beetle; that is what inspired me to get out the metallic & iridescent paints for recent beetle and turtle casts. With winter on the way, a bit of bling is called for!

Murky waters and the right light lead to some fabulous digitally enhanced images!

I am revisiting foil: real aluminum foil with the addition of a digital foil plus the usual fixing & fussing.

The time has come to sort through my old printing plates, now that the Blick Etching press has a new home in Anacortes. I sold the press, and have not been a member of the local Printmakers Guild, Corvidae Press, for many years now. I don’t plan to much printing, but I have kept a number of “permanent” plates that still amuse me. Yesterday I shuffled through a set of mat board & aluminum foil plates, which were used for a “low tech etching” technique.

I colored three of these plates, using various marker pens. Then I scanned these, for the record… After the scan, I digitally foiled the images, of course! Here are the two that I like best. Not my favorite works, but fun nonetheless.

Flora, fauna, and man made objects all leave their own ghosts: shadowy traces and remains that echo like ghosts of the original. I love these reminders of what has been. These images are derived from the ghosts, shadows, and echoes on a well-used outdoor table. The top of this table has magic for me.

I especially love the dark magic in the last foil below, and could not resist a little extra enhancement of some of the imagery and detail in this piece.