||Falling Into Ruinz||

My alltime favorite hobby right now is working on KidRobot toys. I've been doing it for about a year now, and each one that I do looks a little better than the one I did before. This last one took me about two months to do - and the irony involved in this character makes me laugh. I guess I'll do this in chronological order, lol It all started with a can of paint...
I splurged on the Montana paint ($20 a pop) - had a bit of trouble using it, but umm - I took a trip back to the art supply store and felt like an idiot when the woman took the safety off... lol It started out beautifully. The spray comes out exactly like the top of the can - hence the name Gold Chrome. It had an awesome sheen to it, and I had this whole theme in my mind for when I was done spraying. I left it out to dry and went to work. Of course, as fate would have it - it rained that evening while I was gone. When I got home - the water had gotten under the first layer of paint, and gave the spray an old, beat up look. So then I was thinkin 'cool, I can do an antiqued look and keep it moving.' I continued my project.

I beaded the arms one bead at a time. It took about a week to do each arm. That may have been my favorite part (aside from inhaling the spray paint fumes). It hurt my eyes, but a part of the fun is the challenge of putting things together.

Every evening after work, I spent a little time working on the beading. I knew what I wanted out of the project, but I wasn't sure how I wanted it to look. I named him Ruinz when I put the last bead on the arm. I used my Krink paint for the bleeding heart - and the project was complete.

Then, to finish it off - I grabbed my new can of shellack to glaze the entire thing, so the paint will never get messed up. I initially bought the new can for a project that was more heavy duty. As I start spraying, I didn't notice the paint pulling back from the figure. As soon as I stopped spraying - the paint was dripping off the face. I. almost. died.

I watched the paint drip down, and I felt like all that work just got ruined (no pun intended). I was mad all day. When I got home, and the shellack had dried - I took another look at the figure - and I started to see it differently. It actually looked nice. I decided not to give up on it, and I made the treasure chest to put it inside. I'm still working on that part.



If you look closely, you can see where the paint drips off to one side. Yeah, that's how I paint...

The whole project brought me to some interesting conclusions. Sometimes, when we have a certain plan in mind - we try so hard to follow through with it. We spend so much of our life working towards this plan, towards these specific goals - that when things fall out of place -we don't always know what to do. Sometimes, we have to see things at face value. If it's not working the way we planned - we've got to be smart enough to take another approach.

I think Ruinz came out pretty good. I hope Michael likes him. Cuz this is part deux of his birthday present. You didn't think a C++ book was gonna be enough, did you??