ARTISTIC SENSE IS TINGLING!

I got lazy for a few days. Well, it was the weekend and I had been working really hard on this for some time. The break did me good. 

One other reason I was making little progress was the need to get the art on the side of the cabinet. For this, I needed a projector. I can draw but I am pretty slow and personally think my skill is average at best. I freehanded a batman and spiderman logo onto the discarded control panel, this was for a few reasons. I needed to see what the paint looked like on the primer base coat. Black turned out good, I probably should have tested other colours. I also needed something to test a finish on. I needed a good clear coat that would not smear the painting, these logos would later be used for testing that. I don't have a suitable projector so needed to borrow one, that couldn't be done quickly under lockdown so I had time to kill.

While I waited for loaned projectors I decided to replace my workshop door. I bought this hardwood front door a few days before lockdown for £10 on facebook. Needed holes filling as the lock and hinges were all in the wrong place. First time hanging a door. Seems to have worked quite well!

Did leave my workspace in a state though.

So satisfying getting it all back in order. By the way, the Union Jack flags came with those boxes. I'm a proud brit, but I'm not a raving gammon.

Post arrived with a nice surprise. Ordered these a while back from Amazon warehouse for very cheap. A load of white buttons on the left and a complete set of controls on the right, including a zero delay encoder. Something for a future project. (Follow me on twitter @ZZleeZZ if you want to get daily, and sometimes blow by blow, updates.

More playing with projectors. I was still toying with the idea of art on the control panel. I decided not to in the end.

First look at something projected onto the side. The projector is actually a Lenovo android tablet with a built-in pico projector. It's actually brilliant and I would love to own one. I also tried out an old NEC projector of the more traditional type but could not get a focussed image the right size. 

Final positioning, I would have liked less cropping but needed to keep things reasonably big to aid my failing eyes while painting.

I thought the best way to do this is the same way it's done (to the best of my limited knowledge) in comics. Colour goes on first (over the pencil sketch) and the black lines after.

And this is the crushing disappointment pic. I blocked off the projector (scared to turn it off in case it moved the image) and saw this tomato ketchup splatter on the case. I came very close to giving up. It was already late, I was tired, I couldn't see this ever being good enough. For some reason, probably tired bloody-mindedness, I decided to just finish it anyway. I'd probably paint over it in the morning and give it to them plain white.

And so I carried on. The blue was added...

And now I felt less bad. It was still terrible to look at, but at least it didn't look like the pavement outside a nightclub at 3am.

WAIT! What the actual..? What happened?! Reinvigorated I ploughed on.

And little by little I worked at it. I never want to paint that webbing ever again ever!

And with the projector blocked. 

And done! 

It took me four hours to do. Which is actually not bad if you think about it. I went to bed that night, late, with a massive grin on my face that stopped me sleeping for a long time. Stupid grin. I was BUZZING. And, for some stupid reason, I kept thinking that the Batman side would be easy! IDIOT!