Yesterday, Jay painted the final details on the Downey’s mascot and tractor that will sit atop the giant sign/planter we finished last week. This final painting marked the completion of this project. It will stay in the warm shop over the holidays to ensure the paint perfectly cures before we take it out into the cold. There are three more signs to build for this order before we ship to Ontario.
Bringing in the experts
The new laser engraver requires a six-inch vent to extract the noxious fumes that are created while operating the machine. The more direct the path of the ducting, the more efficient the laser will run, so we decided to go straight from the machine through the wall. The thing is, the wall behind the laser is fourteen inches thick, eight of which are solid concrete. Rather than tackle this project ourselves, we put in a call to our friends at Groovin’ Gord, who specialize in coring, cutting and grooving concrete. They were super efficient and wasted no time setting up, drilling the seven-inch hole and then cleaning up perfectly when they were done - all in less than an hour. THANKS!
Finding old artwork
In readiness for the new laser engraver, which is now on its way, it was time to clean out the room where it will live. This room first acted as a picture framing shop when we built our new studio in 2003. We never did much framing of pictures there, and when that equipment was sold off a decade later, this became a storage room. As we all know storage room gathers everything that doesn’t have a proper home, and through the years, a lot of stuff has gathered here. We first emptied the room and sorted into good, needs to be further sorted, and the biggest category of things that needed to go away. It was a busy day of sifting through many decades of artwork, projects and all manner of bits and pieces. One of the hundreds of presentation pieces of art that was tucked onto the dusty shelves was this concept produced for a refurbished entrance to Galaxyland at West Edmonton Mall. This was one of the last large pieces of commercial art which I drew and hand coloured on paper rather than digitally. We ended up fabricating about half of the features depicted in this illustration before our time at West Edmonton Mall came to an end in late 1999. Sorting through the old storage room was a fun look back as we prepared for what will come next. Stay tuned…
