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July 24 The desk story A long time ago, in a galax....oops wrong story. Christi and I spent part of our honeymoon on the shores of Lake Erie. While there we visited a pretty little beach. I drew a heart in the sand, with our initials, the date and an arrow through it. We put our footprints in the sand next to the heart and took a picture with an Instamatic Camera. We've lost the print, but we have the memory. And I've drawn the heart lots of times, with little squiggles for the feet. Christi has drawn it much better. So when she decided to put a design on my new desk for Father's Day, she naturally chose the heart....with just a few embellishments. First of course you have to plan your work. I had a 4x8 sheet of oak cabinet plywood that I cut down to 30" wide for the desk. For the art, Christi did ALOT of thinking (several weeks of sketching). Eventually she asked me to get some contact paper and drew a series of hearts on it, as well as our initials. She cut out an arrow. The plan continued to evolved as she laid it out on the wood. Here she is with the heart taped back together. It ends up on the other end of the desk.  Course, any artist requires time to think some more. She did a lot of this. Lots of walking around too.  The effect on the artist is not always pleasant. (But I've seen worse)  Once she got it laid out, we covered the whole thing with 2 coats of gold oak polyurethane. Then Christi started taking off the first set of masking tape to so we can make the next layer.  Art is often not very pretty when it is partway done. Christi created the different stains by mixing various colors of stain as well as putting on different numbers of layers.  The concentric hearts were removed at different times, with some of them being stained in between. After all the staining, Christi took a utility knife and scored around everything, then rubbed more stain in. She also added color with various paint pens. After she was done, I added at least 2 more layers of clear polyurethane, added a keyboard tray and fastened it to the wall. We covered the edge with a corner piece with more of the golden oak polyurethane on it. A 3 panel panorama of the result.   The contents of the corner shelves are mostly an inspired marriage maintenance kit that Christi created for me prior to our 25th wedding anniversary weekend. But that's another story. The painting is of a bend in the Big South Fork River in Stearns, KY. Christi painted it from a photo I took. She also did the crossstitch to the lower right (yep, she loves me).  We also built a matching desk in the closet for a lab space (hey, I'm a geek). The shelves are chunks of a very nice entertainment cabinet (5' x 6') that I rescued from the dumpster at our last apartment complex. Notice the heart on the whiteboard. That's what my versions usually look like. Yeah she did that crossstitch too.  A closeup of the heart. Christi hand drew the little feet, silver for the boys, gold for the girls. Our "feet" at the bottom are actually the sides of our hands. Each of the children had an assigned color (had to have some way to organize all the home school school work). Their birthdays are in the fletches of the arrows in their own colors. (The bolt has no meaning. I forgot it was there.)  Comments (8)
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