Painting

A Lot On My Plate

AKA: Cat breaks a plate and turns it into an artwork to make it look intentional

Fun fact: I can be a bit of a klutz. Not for lack of motor skills per se, rather in the sense that I tend to choose odd ways of going about things. I take a lot of calculated risks, and boy am I bad at maths. (I’m actually pretty good at maths, but that’s besides the point.) In one such recent venture of risk-taking, I managed to smash two perfectly good second hand plates in an overestimation of my own plate-carrying skills. Luckily they were my own plates, so I wasn’t stuck with any awkward situations on a social front, but it did leave me with quite a lot of plate shards. The plates had actually managed to fracture into pretty big pieces, so naturally I decided to save them. Now the real question was: what would I do with them?

Those of you that know me have probably guessed the answer: paint my OCs on them, of course!

I went for the plate with the smaller shards first. I’ve been working a lot on my book Rust & Revolutionaries over the past year, so I figured it would be cool to turn the various shards into the different robot characters from the story. The explanation being that each of them contains a fracture of the story, or something poetic like that. I started by painting over the shards in a few layers of titanium white acrylic, and then set to work with pencil sketches. Over the course of the following month or two, I kept adding small details whenever I had the time– painting a character’s hair here, adding some highlights there. Slowly but surely they started to come together, and after lots of procrastination at last they were completed! I coated the final versions with some transparent nail polish (top coat is an excellent DIY preserving material, fight me) to give them a little extra shine and prevent the paint from chipping too easily. And voilà, they’re done! Look at them go!

Now I still have plate shards littered around my room– but hey, at least they’re pretty paint shards. Plus now I can get rid of them by giving them to friends! Never thought I’d donate my broken dishes to people and have them be happy about it. Artist life hack?

That’s all for today, folks! Take care <3

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