I’ve been playing around with color a little bit.  I’m not good at it (yet) but it’s giving me the opportunity to do something other than “brown and round”.  One technique I’ve been playing with is dipping work in spray paint.  This process has been called many things (hydro-dipping, water marbling, and ebru, if you’re in Turkey) and used on paper, nails, wood, guitars, skulls, and just about anything else.  The process is basically the same.  fill a tub full of water, spray different colors of spray-paint on the surface of the water, swirl it around, then dunk something in it.  The paint will float on top of the water and transfer onto what ever is dipped.  Sounds simple, right?

Not so fast!

The type of paint you spray makes a difference.  I added some metallic silver paint and it doesn’t behave like regular spray paint and absolutely refuses to mix with it’s cousin.  Instead, it kinda clumps up in little floating globs that stick to whatever you dip like a big shiny booger.  Even two different colors of paint from the same manufacturer won’t always react like you’re expect.  Some of it will stick to whatever you use to stir the paint before dipping, making another globby mess.  It should also be noted that spray paint will completely ruin whatever you’re using to hold the water by leaving a Technicolor bath tub ring from hell.  It will also stick to your hands so completely that mineral spirits are required to get rid of it.  And don’t spill any on your driveway or it will look like someone murdered an artist’s palette in front of your house.

This project was nothing but luck, both good and bad.  I started with a crappy piece of pine that should have been firewood because if had a huge knot right in the middle of it.  Bad luck.  When I turned the basic shape and took out the middle, somehow the knot was completely turned away.  Good luck.  When I started to do the painting, I put a flat coat of black spray paint on the whole thing, then dipped it in two different shades of blue, some red, and a little bit of the metallic.  (One of my daughters saw it drying and said, “That looks like Spiderman”.  As soon as she said it, I realized how right she was, hence the name.)  Being pine and being dipped in water, as the bowl dried, it started to crack and the grain suddenly became very uneven.  Bad luck.  It also had the globs on the side from where the metallic paint failed to mix with the regular spray paint.  More bad luck.  I figured the only thing I could do was put it back on the lathe, turn off all the paint, get it back into round, then try the whole dipping thing again.  About 30 seconds into sanding the paint off, I stopped the lathe because there was a weird color starting to come out.  The grain that had raised by the water had been sanded bare, but the other parts of the bowl still had the dipped color.  The effect of this happy accident was a really cool variation in the colors!  Very good luck!  All that was left was to finish the bottom of the bowl, which should have take about 5 minutes.  4:59 seconds into the process, the bowl came loose from the lathe and started banging around at a very high rate of speed.  I was left with a smudge in the paint on one side and a series of holes near the base on the other side that looks like a rabid woodpecker went on a rampage.  Bad luck…

Here’s the finished project.  It looks really good from a distance, so I’ll keep it, but  if another turner looked at it, the critiques would NOT be kind.  With all that I learned with this project, the next one will be much, much better!