So lately I’ve been fooling around with assemblage art. I seem to be building shrines to fish. (I am dying to build a shrine to somebody called the Sardine Madonna, but the image is stubbornly not coming. Putting a fish head on the Virgin Mary is not working. (I know, right? It totally should!) She might want to be a cormorant, but something’s just…not gelling yet. Hopefully it will, because the name is really ringing in my head. I resign myself to building a very small shrine for what appears to be a long-nosed gar.

This may be one of my do-it-twice-and-never-again-things, god knows, but it’s fun so far. It’s part of what I was looking for artistically, in that there’s a lot of problems that I haven’t already solved. My first attempt is languishing largely unfinished because something’s missing and I don’t know what yet, but the second one seems to be working out. (It’s oddly slow, since I don’t really know what to do next at any given stage–unlike a painting where you just keep going until you’ve covered all the white space and all the chickens look like chickens, this has no set point of done-ness that you have to reach.)

Also, I got this gunk that allows me to rust pretty much anything–it’s a paintable iron, and paintable corrosive, and dude, I’m totally going nuts with that. Corrosion is probably not a power I should have been granted.

As part of this, I wound up at the flea market today, roaming around looking for…things. Artist brain seems to know what it’s looking for, but it can’t actually communicate this to conscious brain, so it was kind of a process of holding up things in front of artist brain and waiting for a yea-or-nay from somewhere in the back of my skull. So I wound up with a bunch of old keys and some small bits and pieces of architectural salvage, a very small tin that used to contain phonograph needles, some rough jade beads, a very small copper oranda charm, and two latex glove molds (which look like large, blocky flat hands.) At least one bit has already been useful, we’ll see about the others.

I had just finished buying an old metal plate, and gotten three bucks change, when my eye fell on some old plastic welding goggles. I picked one up–there were two–and turned it over. It’s the sort of thing that people are steampunking the heck out’ve these days. It was awfully dusty.

"I’ll give you both pairs and all the lenses for $3," said the guy behind the table.

"Astonishingly, I have $3," I said, reaching for my wallet.

"I know. That’s why I said it." 

So now I have two pairs of extremely dusty but rather nifty welding goggles and about twenty lenses in various colors (mostly clear and green) for said goggles, for $3. I kinda want to steampunk ’em up, but I’m not sure how to start…I can make them rust, but I don’t think that’s neccessarily where they should go, since it’s steampunk not decayed-industrial-apocalypse (although that would be neat, too.)