The Exhibition - Part 2

Some Terrible Ideas in The Shower.

So, last time I left off, we still had a week to go till opening night and had discovered it was highly likely that nobody was coming…

So, where do we start?

The Shower.

Because big thoughts always happen in the shower.

While standing under the surprisingly impressive Berlin water pressure, with just a week before the opening, I started thinking about doing two more completely new pieces. (Because that obviously makes sense)

The first thing I was thinking of was this one…

But more on that later… (Oooh teaser for Part 3!)

The other one I was thinking about was this comic I drew a while back…

And while shampooing my beard, I had a “WHY DIDN’T I THINK OF THIS EARLIER?!” kinda thought…

Surely, I thought, there are blank jigsaw puzzles you can buy!

And if so, could I conceivably recreate this drawing as an actual jigsaw puzzle?

Well, folks… THERE ARE! and I was pretty sure I could!

And so I jumped online and made a deal with the devil, and the devil said they do next-day delivery, and then it turned out I had a subscription with the Lord of Darkness so shipping would be free as well, which when you’re on a ONE-WEEK-TO-GO kinda schedule is exactly what you want to hear (and that’s how he works I guess)

And the next day my lovely blank little pieces all arrived!

The only issue was, at 4x6 they weren’t even close to the right size, so I began a kind of jigsaw piece organ harvesting operation, using multiple sets to gradually build up a Frankenstein’s Monster of the required 8x8 arrangement.

The next challenge was applying colour. I figured that would be easy and some blue markers would be perfect.

They were not.

No matter I thought! I could just paint over the top…

This idea also turned out to be terrible.

At this point, I decided it was probably time for another shower.

And so, I was forced to do it the hard way, by meticulously painting each piece individually, three coats each, sanding the edges, and carefully reconstructing the entire thing.

I was also forced to admit that my girlfriend, who’d suggested this method from the very beginning, had been absolutely right all along.

And so I got to work…

I’ll be honest, looking at a nifty little slideshow of the process makes it look a lot easier than it was.

“BUT CHAZ” I can hear you ask, “How on earth did you keep track of where each piece was supposed to go in the jigsaw?!”

Well, I’m glad you asked…

I know right? I’m basically Arty Alan Turing.

What was great about all this extra work is that I only had something like 4 days left until the exhibition opening.

Thankfully though, I managed to get the real thing looking incredibly similar to the original drawn version. Just look at this side-by-side!

All that was left was to find a frame, and then work out a complicated system of double-sided tape and mounting which isn’t interesting enough to put in here, but rest assured it was (unsurprisingly) far more complicated than I anticipated.

And unbelievably, with just days to go, it was finally done!

It seriously is one of my favourite bits of work and easily the one I’m most proud of!

(I’ve since got the process a little more under control these days and you can now purchase your very own version. I’ll even do them in different colours!)

And that’s it for this episode of “Chaz’s Mad Dash To Make All The Art in Time” - In the next installment, we’ll find out why buying the biggest frame you can find and then working out what to put in it isn’t necessarily the smartest idea.

And yet… that’s exactly what I did.

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