Scenes From The Bunker

Getting close to the end of the pile here.

Not sure if I ever mentioned the "Sorry About Your Hemorrhoids" potato from the BFF, pictured enormously drunk in the shot right behind it:

That was the first official night in the Bunker. *sniff* The potato arrived around the same time as the Ship-A-Dick. The BFF was on a roll. I put the potato on the shelf for posterity, assuming it would last forever, like our friendship!! Until one day I noticed a small black puddle of I don't know what oozing out from under it. Had to toss it out. R.I.P. Hemorrhoid Potato. :(

Pretty sure I remember collecting and sending in box tops plus like $1.50 for this back in the Dark Ages. Now it lives next to my stove:

The Cowboy once brought me a four pack of Bitch Creek because he had already drunk two of them. I made a vase.

Not sure if I've posted photos of my knife target. My graffiti game is on point.

Hashtag Art.

I once asked the Cowboy if he wanted to go see some superhero movie that had just come out. He replied, "So we can watch them battle a churning ball of shit?" I drew this for him:

Couple more out of the nightly sketchbook:

Finally took a photo of the hatband I made for my straw hat. Muskrat bones and glass beads that aren't turquoise but look like maybe turquoise:

And finally, I have almost burned through my glow in the dark Utahraptor notebook for work, so I prepped a new one:

I will follow those dudes into hell.

Scenes From Factory Job

A couple weeks ago Agent Cody greeted me with, "Tomorrow is Georgie's birthday! I'm going to bring banana nut muffins, cream puffs..." I interrupted to point out that tomorrow was a saturday. Cody said, "I'm going to bring it in on Monday!" I said, "Oh, okay. Also, who the fuck is Georgie?" Cody replied, "The gorilla!"

One year ago Cody taped this paper King Kong to the top of a pole near the area where he works. Then he marked down the date and christened him Georgie. N.U.T.S.A.C. is alive and well at Factory Job, y'all.

True to his word, Agent Cody turned it out for Georgie the following Monday:

I made Georgie a card from all of us at N.U.T.S.A.C.

And then I insisted that Cody give Georgie a party hat.

Not surprisingly, everyone except Cody and myself were completely confused by this party. That's why we have to stick together. N.U.T.S.A.C. REPRAZENT

However, we're not the only ones that need joy down at Factory Job, as exhibited by this tray that once came sailing down the conveyor belt:

There there, little dude. :(

But some progress is being made! Someone shattered a knob on one of the paper folders, and replacement parts are non-existent due to everyone ever involved in its manufacture being long dead and buried. After confirming with the maintenance guys that the possibility of warranty violation was completely laughable, I brought in a small piece of my Wonderflex, my heat gun, and some appropriately colored markers. Voila!

I hit that baby with a paint marker and challenged anyone to tell which knob was the original:

Completely identical.

Last but not least, I put up an Archie McPhee rubber chicken poster in the server room for my own amusement. One of my coworkers spotted it and asked why it had been crucified. I handed her some Sharpies and insisted she make it official. She obliged.

What we do is right.

The West Is Best For Encaustics

As I mentioned in a previous post, I realize now why encaustic artists live out west. The temperature and humidity are perfect for the wax, and also perfect for the person standing over a hot grill. Not like sweltering Georgia! What a miserable swamp!!

My neighbor is an artist, so I told her I would drag her outside one day and let her play with all my encaustic stuff. She contributed a few boxes of jewelry and other items to embed in the wax, and we had a blast.

The Cowboy's ex-girlfriend/BFF wanted to come over, but then failed to mention it was also her birthday. No one gets away with that on my watch:

It's not much, but I only had like two days' notice. I did what I could.

I have a few complaints about that griddle, one of which is the cord is only about 2 feet long. Thus the power strip resting on the table right next to a major heat source. It's my fault because I went super cheap and that thing was like 12 bucks. I need to upgrade. I also have to snake an extension cord out of the back window of the house because there do not appear to be any outlets out there. I plan to look harder and then ask my landlord. Anyway, we managed. I made these:

More of the muskrat bones. They come in handy!

This poor dude is tripping ballz.

The next one involves some copper leaf, Japanese paper, and one of my neighbor's jewelry findings:

This one went to a weird place so I jammed some heart beads into it:

This one was slightly more successful:

My neighbor holding up the two pieces she made:

Ex-girlfriend/BFF is an art teacher, so she took to the medium like a fish to water:

We need to do this again. It was too much fun. I like to have the whole weekend though because it's a whore to set up. It's good to work out the bugs on Day One, let everything cool down and throw a tarp over it for the night, then go back out and resume the next day. This works out great because IT DOESN'T RAIN IN UTAH. The concept of leaving ANYTHING AT ALL OUTSIDE OVERNIGHT is completely foreign to me. Hahahah! Takes some getting used to.

Actually I need to keep Utah a secret....what I meant to say is that the weather is completely horrible all the time, please no one else ever move here. It's terrible and I hate it. Stay where you are. Thanks.

To My Sisterwife: And Other Random Cards

Y'all, these pics have been piling up. Let's keep powering through them.

My Sisterwife is now dating Ex-Husband, so we are closer than ever to literally being Sisterwives. And I live in Utah now so we could make it really official. Anyway I love her dearly, and I am very happy for them. So I made this for her birthday. If I remember correctly I used some thin cardboard sheets cut into squares, duct taped them together, and covered them in acrylic paint:

And the squiggly lines are probably my Jelly Roll pen because I love that thing so much.

Thanks again to whomever it was that gave me the book of hair metal. It's the gift that keeps on giving. Judging by the spacing job on that last page, I may have been a bit drunk. At least I hope I was.

I'll just fill in the rest of this post with some other random cards, and say again that I love my die cutter and I love embossing powder.

I made this one for my surrogate mom. I really like that die even though it's a bitch to clean up after.

This is a tag I made that I'm particularly proud of:

Embossing powder just makes everything look pro. It's the best.

Hooray, all the cards are cleared out of the backlog!! Plenty of other nonsense in there though, don't worry. I stay busy. Peace out.

Candles and Nanas and Boobies Oh My

In the endless pursuit of mastering all 70s crafts, I borrowed this bottle cutter from the Cowboy. The box is amazing:

It's tough to get this to work every time, and some glass bottles are super cheap. So the only bottles that survived this experiment are as follows:

L-R: Mini Tanqueray, two Mexican cokes, and a black cherry soda. [Also pictured: the Cowboy's gummy bears and gigantic pumpkin.] Nothing else survived the cutting process. And I don't feel comfortable drinking out of any of these things so I made them into candles. Fun fact, I used brown dye in the wax which was the perfect soda color until it cooled. Now they're all a soothing 70s beige.

I had some wax leftover and all I had in the stash was a DAD mug. I customized it with some rub-on letters to make it more to my liking.

They probably won't stay on there forever, but they are way more durable than I expected. Hooray! Look how soothing....

I've been meaning to present another Official N.U.T.S.A.C. Nana:

PRAISE HER HOLY NAME.

I made this card for Ex-Husband, I think for Valentine's Day?

The background stenciling came out kind of sloppy, but also kind of looks like a sloppy bordello, which totally works.

And lastly, when I've worked a full day and then gone to boxing, sometimes I'm too tired to do anything creatively meaningful. So I've been trying to just put something in my sketchbook so I don't go for long stretches without making anything. One night I decided to draw eyes, but I was drinking the Five Wives vodka so then some boobies appeared.

Still counting the minutes until my camping trip. Need to go do a lap through Factory Job and then continue cleaning out the craft backlog. Hooray!

The Trump Coloring Book

My British friends are really enjoying that Trump is our president. They sent me this book:

All of the pages have the same layout, similar to this:

During a time when there were no I.T. fires to put out, I started coloring it with the massive pile of colored pencils I keep at my desk. There's a lot of open space behind each portrait, so then I decided to start filling in my own backgrounds.

Anybody know if they made one of these for Boris Johnson?