Studio Notes: September 28th, 2021

Transcript:

I'm Brandon Woods, and this is Studio Notes for Tuesday, September 28th, 2021. Today I am in my studio and I am gluing up these small panels, these small shaped panels that I cut the other day. I went through yesterday at the end of the day, I didn't record this part, but I went through and sprayed shellac on the backs of these panels and on both sides and the insides of these frames. And I I've sanded them down so that they are really perfectly smooth all around. And now I am... Oh, and flooded, I flooded them all earlier, too.

It dawned on me that I didn't really need to, or possibly didn't need to flood them just because of the... I got really distracted because my lights, my, my colored lights there are changing, so I think that the, the color of this video might wind up changing over the course of the video as the sun sets in Arizona. That's something really cool that I that I want to talk about later.

But yeah, so I am gluing these up. Oh, yeah. It occurred to me that after spraying shellac on here, I might possibly not have needed to flood the boards, but whenever I whenever I put my like, watered-down wood glue on there to flood them. They did still soak some of that up. So I think it was probably still a good idea to do. I like this, I got this from Rockler. Honestly, it's probably way overpriced, but I like the pointy tip on this for, for this purpose. They also I think in that kit also had one that was supposed to be kind of the width of the of a board. But I like going through and painting in the paint after I put a good bead running right down the middle. And I'm going to use too much glue. It always seems like I use way too much and I'm just going to clean it out. Probably still better to use too much than too little, better still to use exactly the right amount. So, my same Titebond wood...brush, wood glue brush. This thing really does come in handy for a lot of things that I do with so. Yeah. It was hard for me to start making this video today.

For some reason, I don't know why, I felt really nervous and, it's weird, I wasn't I wasn't expecting that. The first, first, the first one that I did, I felt a little nervous. And the second one, a little bit less so. But now I'm on the ninth one and maybe it's that beginner's luck turns into, turns into a professional choking. And there's some really interesting science behind choking and all of that. That whenever a beginner starts something, they are much more attentive. They're paying a lot more attention to what they're doing. And what happens whenever professionals choke and say, like in baseball, baseball is kind of the example that I've heard most often used. It's it's because they've stopped, stopped paying so much attention because they've they've really they've mastered what they're doing so much, but then they become really aware that they're not paying as much attention and then they start paying attention again and they just kind of get in their heads. And that's that's that's how they choke. Maybe that's, I mean, that's a little bit of something that's happening to me today. I don't know, could also be allergies. I've kind of felt a little bit off all day. But all that aside. Now I've got the wood glue on the panel now and clamp it all together.

I came up with a joke. It's a terrible joke. And those are kind of the best jokes that I tell. That...what.. If you ask any woodworker how many clamps they have, they'll all tell you the same thing: "Not enough!" …Yeah.

This one's really long. I always like to kind of float these up on a riser of some sort. So these are called Bench Cookies, which sounds delicious, but they're not edible. And they are really great for gripping anything that I'm working on. But I found that they were really never tall enough. And Rockler does make some risers for them. But even then, they're not really tall enough for my, for my purposes. So I just took cans of paint. This is a ton of Chalkboard paint. It's probably still a good Chalkboard, too. But I just taped a drawer liner over the top of it and some carpet grip on the bottom. And that's that's my taller bench cookie. And I like to try to clamp at least, at least three inches apart or at, I should say, a minimum three inches apart, and yeah, between three and six inches. If I clamp any closer together than that, harder to get into. Oh. This is going to give me an issue. I can't get in to actually get all the wood glue cleaned off of my panel, which is the next step that I want to do after I get these clamps on here.

All right, let's see how this goes. I've got some different clamps on there. Oh, OK. Oh, that works so, I'm going to add...well, I'll clean up this area right here first. Just wiping off the excess glue that's been squeezed out from the clamps that are already there. Oh, give out a little bit more, more support here. So I gues maybe now it's going to dance a little bit. This little glue brush heads just pop right off of these. And it's a good idea to take those off before, before turning it around and using this. This is sort of like a chisel side, and it helps to get the glue off, just to scrape off. I've heard some woodworkers say a better way to go for cleaning or for the glue is to wait 15 or, 10 or 15 minutes until the glue starts to get just a little bit harder then go through with a, go through with the chisel and clean it off, because then it just scrapes off really easily. But I've found that it's just too hard to get to. And that for my for my purposes, it's a little bit easier if I'm going through while it's still wet when I can use things like I really extra long Q-tip to get in there. I want to make sure that I get all of the... I use a lot of paper towels in this too, it's...I don't love using a lot of paper towels. But they do a good job. So. As much glue as I can get off. And that's been squeezed out the better because then I'm not putting my router bit through the wood glue too. In addition to putting it through the board, because I'm going to be routing off this edge on here. And getting this flush with the with the panel, but also because, since the, since the router bit has a little bearing on it that follows around the panel, I, um, if there's wood glue up there, sometimes it'll almost make it kind of jump a little bit and it won't be that perfectly flush. Really super clean.

I'm getting really behind on these Studio Notes video. I'm good at recording them pretty much pretty much daily. But I think now I'm actually four days behind. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to, it's hard to find the time to actually well, to produce content and then edit that content and then put all that content out online while also producing work, producing artwork and I'm trying to get all of my artwork out into the world too. Eventually, eventually hopefully, I'll be able to get a, well first get some sort of just fast process set up where I can just kind of throw my, throw my video into Premiere Pro and and then have the, have the audio, have a, like, preset for for the audio already done and et cetera, et cetera, so that so the post-production will take 10 minutes instead of sort of as long as it's taking but I don't know if there's going to be a way that I'm going to be able to get better, better captions than the slow wave that I've been doing it, which is just watching the video and then going through and correcting all the auto-generated captions. And, you know, maybe it's not the...maybe getting the video out there is a little bit more important. But I think that not only the captions are going to be helpful for people who aren't able to hear the video, but also for people who are not in a place where they can listen to the video or, or, you know, whatever other host of reasons that person might have for the captions. Maybe, maybe it's someone who is learning English and they want to have the captions on while they're watching it so they can learn to speak English. I mean, I also don't want the captions to misrepresent what I have to say and that that's really important to me and that the captions don't just turn my, my ramblings into more word soup than they already are at times, because occasionally, I think in pretty much every one of these videos, there's a little gem in there somewhere, at least one that makes the video worth watching, I hope. If nothing else, I will appreciate making that I made these videos. In five years or ten years, whenever I am able to go back and see where how far I've come in my process.

These start to look like, almost like centipedes or something. With these long, many legs in the clamps. Some steampunk centipede. That could be a cool name for a band. Tomorrow, I probably won't be in my studio. I'll probably I'll probably be at home, in my, my office, my library office. Because I have a, I have this thing with UT, like a webinar type thing, and that's about how to monetize your artwork. So I'm one of the, I guess I'm one of the panelists for them. The web, web panel discussion. Yeah, yeah. That's what it is. So, yeah, that's what I...oops, I should probably know. But no, I think it's I think it's going to be more just sort of a conversation about professional practices in the arts and how to how to make a living doing what you love. So I'm going from being the I, I guess, sort of, sort of when the students...

My camera got too hot, so I had to start it up again. I guess recording in 4K HD kind of takes its toll because it's really recording it in 4...or 8K and then kind of turning that into 4K. So it's the best 4K that it can be. Now it's just recording in just 4K, and, yeah. So now I've got this panel all, all cleaned up, except for this one little spot.And I'm about to move on to the next one, but I'm going to in the video there and I want to encourage you to do what you love, make good work, and I'll talk to you soon.