large and absurd project!

club detail, grayscale w/ "stained glass"
Originally uploaded by elsacapuntas.

As previously mentioned, Asshat Of All Asshats, aka our landlord/owner of the house I live in, wants his house back and is making my housemates and I leave at the end of July. After a couple weeks of housing-search stress, I have signed a lease on a place only a few blocks from where I'm living now.

One web site I stumbled upon while searching for advice on making a couch slipcover suggested creating a "focal point" for a boxy room, like the rooms in most houses built between 1920 and 1950 in this country, before the rectangle was discovered. This is the sort of place I will be moving into.

Thus, I have undertaken the task of creating a "focal point." My "focal point" is to be a large piece of wall art based on a Slovenian beehive painting (a type of traditional folk art from Slovenia, the homeland of the maternal side of my family) of two women jousting on cows with a club and a pitchfork.



I'm not sure what the story is behind this, but it seems like everyday Slovenian fun to me.

The first steps involved using Photoshop and time I should have been doing work at work enlarging the image to 60"x32" and converting it to grayscale and applying the "stained glass" photoshop filter (I really wanted to make it look like a dot matrix, but I couldn't figure out how and got impatient, choosing the stained glass thing as the closest approximation). Since it's unlikely printing an image that size will be easy or cheap, I divided the big image into a grid of 24 10"x8" rectangles and saved them as separate files. So, I can print out 24 sheets of normal sized paper. Easy and cheap!

This is where things get a little fuzzy. In the end I want to somehow make the picture colorful and adhere it to a large piece of lightweight wood or wood product, then shellac it or decoupage it or otherwise make it so liquids that may be tossed at eye-level will not instantly ruin it. Ah, and I don't particularly have any painting skills or experience with any of this. Only an assumption that my innate craftiness will yield a satisfactory final product.

Stay tuned for updates on progress, or the lack thereof. Hopefully this will go much better than my recent attempts at carving boobs into a potato (note to anyone attempting this in the future: the nipples break very easily).