Post #300 - the simple beauty of friendly plastic

I have a thing for alphabets, type styles, fonts, text, letter shapes and plain old words. One of the best uses for friendly plastic has been in the simple construction of my sign. I firmly believe your sign should reflect your medium. Painters should have a painted sign. Ceramic artists a clay sign. Textile artists something sewn. It's a very effective way to show what you do. What I didn't realize is that there are lots of people out there who want their name in friendly plastic too. I've only made one but there's a young artist in my hometown (Keely you know it's you!) who made the names of all her friends after I showed her how to work fp on a visit here a few years ago.

A sign can use up a lot of plastic and this is the primary reason I don't make these for others. I made my own business name from snappers worked very slowly and minimally. I also chose the colours that just don't do it for me (hello burnt orange blechh) or those sticks that I had a lot of like light blue.

I didn't try to disguise the joins or do anything fancy. I just like the plastic like it is. I rarely try to change the surface. I'm a friendly plastic purist. I enjoy the sheer plasticness of it and the round shapes and the pillowy surface a melted stick gives you. There is much to love here without colouring or twisting or marbling or pressing it into a mold.

I did use one of my favorite colours for my name: metallic red on red. It is SO vibrant. I swear between metallic red on red, metallic royal blue on black, and metallic purple on black, and even metallic white on white, I will never leave this medium. There is nothing to compare to it. I know my friendly plastic blog has been short on friendly plastic, and this with the resurgence of fp on the scene, but first things first and getting my fine art diploma was at the top of my to do list. With graduation fast approaching I am looking ahead to re-discovering fp and making some of the things that have crossed my mind. Most of these are BiG ThInGs. With 4 rubbermaid bins of bits more or less full I've got a lot of raw material to dig into, and with three years of art school a lot more ideas of how to approach this stuff. Fun.