Zed Vector bust for the art exhibition (Patreon)

Sorry guys for another disappearing, I had one hell of a week and feel very exhausted.

Not sure if everybody read my previous big pixel animation post to the end where I mentioned my nearest plans so I'll repeat it again:

As you maybe remember, one year ago in June 2023 I participated in a big exhibition arranged by a curator from Moscow. It was her project to explore underground art life of our city and arrange 6 exhibitions in a row, one for each month from March to July (if I remember it right, maybe the first one was in February). She met me there being just a visitor first, got interested in my old non-furry art and decided to exhibit it on some of these exhibitions. Later she took an interview from me and it turned so personal that I decided to confess that now I'm not doing anything like my old art anymore because I switched to making 18+ furry art. I showed some examples to her and surprisingly she enjoyed it in some way. She said sharing such a love for fictional cartoon characters is an interesting concept and can be used for a pop-art part of the June exhibition but it must be something innocent and sfw. She promised to pay all the material expenses if I create a big piece especially for the exhibition. I had thoughts in mind and created that TV shaped piece with six toony characters, this is how my OCs were born.
The time went by and then the same curator invited me to participate in a new exhibition project, this time set in Moscow itself. Its idea is to sum up the art experience of the previous exhibition project arranged in our city but this time showing the results of it to a Moscow audience. So, she invited all the same artists from our city to participate in it and also found some new ones. Conditions are the same, she promised to pay all the expenses for the materials if there's a necessity to create a new piece, deal with transportation by herself and also to pay for the road to Moscow and back to get us all at the exhibition opening (I think I'd never find enough money to pay it myself so it's a good thing to do).

In my case, making a new piece was a necessity because she very much wanted to exhibit my TV wall piece but one work wasn't enough to present an artist on such event and, since this is the only suitable piece I have, I had to create something else.

All the dates and deadlines were set long time beforehand, I was warned in January and had a plenty of time to work on the project, whole 4 months. I did sketches, proved them with curator and started working in February. I tried to use new technique with DIY self-drying clay made of starch and wooden glue which I had big hopes for, mainly because it could become a new era for my NSFW sculptures which I was making in a much cruder technique before and wanted to find a cheap yet better material for more refined work. I don't know what exactly went wrong but I assume it was a bad idea to mix this mass with paint so the structure started to act like shit, especially during drying. I still want to learn my mistakes and master this material as I really want to sculpt proper detailed dicks but I really had no time and money for such experiments, god knows if I could succeed and when, while my time was very short.

Due to such problem I abandoned this project for quite a long time and didn't know what to do, not to mention I had a plenty of my personal furry art plans and personal deadlines such as Pass a Gas Day art, St. Valentine's Day art, Volk comic and tons of commissions. It's very hard to combine such projects with my main work, I barely have free time for anything else besides art, I haven't done any physical pieces for years even for myself, let alone for some exhibition which doesn't really have any direct relation to furry.

Few months later I found the solution and realized I can make a completely different thing in a technique much more familiar to me so I can feel much more confident about results.

I decided to create a piece which was planned to be the second work for 2023 exhibition along with the TV piece, I already did a concept art for it back then which you see above but got time to finish only one work out of 2. All I needed for it is a lot of pvc plastic, glue, paint and lacquer which I already know how to work with.

But it was the very end of March, just one month before the deadline. I was still busy, wanted to finish this big pixel animation project and Leroy weight gain sequence first but it also took half of the month. When everything was done I had very little time left.

So, the remaining days were simply insane. I literally fell out of reality lately (or at least the reality of dirty furry social world I usually live in 24/7) just like the time when I was making this artwork for the previous exhibition but even worse. Since the last update I posted here, I was doing nothing all day but working on that project starting at the early morning and ending at the late night with just a bit of time given to answer very few people, quickly check my feed on FA and Twitter and jerk off to vent off of course, and this was my schedule for 6 days in a row. I'm extremely exhausted and very much worried about what's going on here, felt so afraid to see the number of subscribers declining greatly which I really didn't want to happen. Surprisingly, nobody unsubscribed and I even got some new members, thank you guys for being patient and supportive! (or maybe it's just a bit early, usually I always lose a lot of people in the very last days of each month)

This time I didn't document the process with photos as thoroughly as I did with my TV piece but anyway there's some things to tell.

The first part I made is zebra box. First I wanted to make it out of styrofoam ceiling panels I had, they're very light and thin which is a good thing but they're also very fragile, I tried to harden them with paper in a papier-mache technique but I had no time to make it with tiny pieces of paper as it's supposed to be and tried to glue whole sheets but the result was awful, it all got covered in wrinkles and bent inside in the middle under the weight of paper and glue.

(and don't worry, I'm not cutting my own artworks for this, these are old sheets with various details for the extra edits you see here for all my works. After they fulfilled their purpose I don't need them anymore but I can't make myself to get rid of them so I keep growing that pile of needless paper waste)

I realized I need something harder and remembered that I have a lot of good sheets of fiberboard I found in a trash long time ago and took them hoping to find them a good purpose in future art and so their time have come.

New box turned out MUCH better, painting it was still a pain though. Turning non-white surfaces white takes ages, at least with a gloss acrylic from the brand I always buy, the hiding power of their acrylics varies a lot, it's easier with complex darker or lighter colors and you can achieve an evenly colored surface after 2-3 layers but basic bright colors like white, yellow, red, green or ultramarine can take 10 layers to make it perfect without the surface shining through it like if this paint is like a glass.
But after 10 layers of paint it looked nice and then I did the stripes. Bad styrofoam box came in handy as I used it for training to create a proper dynamic rhythm of stripes before painting them on the final box. It looked very neat even at that stage without any details, hypnotic and almost like an optical illusion.

Next I made cylinders for the bottom part. I didn't have any ready objects for the big ones so I had to cut multiple circles out of styrofoam panels, glue them together and then cover with thin pvc plastic, I bought a very large sheet, even bigger than I needed. Red part was easy because an old empty can of lacquer I used for my previous work fit it perfectly, I just covered it with multiple layers of paper and painted it red.

Painting big cylinder was pretty pleasurable, I realized I love golden paint a lot and I wish this work had more golden elements.

Honestly it's hard to recall the order in which I worked next, it was chaotic with lots of cutting, painting, gluing and varnishing, it was a never ending cycle of multitasking and feverishly trying to use my daytime as effective as possible. After all, I couldn't slack with most of operations as they all imply a lot of waiting time for drying, so I had to remember that it's better to varnish something first as lacquer takes 2 hours to dry before the next layer can be applied and I needed to varnish everything a LOT for a better look so it really was important to not miss the nearest available time for applying the next layer, while it dries I can glue or paint something as it dries faster, while some glued or painted elements dry I can glue or paint something else or cut something else as cutting is the only operation which doesn't need any wait. Not to mention that I was always running to my bathroom to wash the brushes properly. I have only 4 brushes one of which is a massive brush for lacquer only so I needed to wash them properly with soap before going from one paint to another to keep the color clean. Just rinsing it in a can of water wasn't enough sometimes as a bit of paint can still stick inside the brush. Not to mention that for varnishing small elements I used the same small brushes I use for painting and these should be cleaned thoroughly with solvent.

So, I really felt like Tom here.

And nobody said everything went well as I wanted, stuff refusing to glue together, dust and shit sticking to freshly painted surfaces and then frustration raised to an unbelievable scale when I had to make Zed's figure which wasn't just a flat stuff like writings, it was a very complex 3D object and it had problems with measurement calculations EVERYWHERE. Every element had edges sticking too far or being too short no matter how carefully I tried to calculate it, there also were moments when I simply couldn't rush and had to sit and think about how some elements should be constructed.
For example, neck was the trickiest part. You see, it's very thin but it holds a very big head, bigger than the body, the snout is also sticking a lot to the left so the imbalance is insane here. But this thing should stand somehow without falling. This is why I decided to make the body out of fiberboard and the rest of the lighter pvc to shift the center of gravity to the bottom and help it to support the big head.
As for the neck, I know a solid wireframe could help but I didn't have anything metal by hand so I had to do something else. The neck couldn't be just a separate box standing on a body and holding a giant head on its tiny top of course so I decided to turn it into a long shaft going from the very bottom of the body and through the snout which will be enough to hold the head itself as well. Then I realized that the neck has not the best shape for this, almost like a long pyramid, so if I extend this shape to the top side of the snout it will rest against it with a very tiny spot so Zed will be like a wobblehead with the shape moving on a triangular stake freely.

The final solution which saved the situation was to turn it into a T shaped support pillar similar to the ones used in coal mines or bridges. The width of this widened top part was enough to resist any wobbling, support the head and make sure that the whole structure will stay strong without falling as its weight became pretty big in the bottom. For this, I decided to cut a lot of such identical shapes out of fiberboard until I have enough layers for the neck thickness I need. And pvc layers for better smoothness of course. Thankfully, it worked very well.

One more bad experience I had with the body is that I didn't want to go through the hell of covering fiberboard with a ton of paint layers again so I thought it would be easier to cover it with paper and then paint it as white surfaces are always easier to paint in bright colors. It's not the same as styrofoam as fiberboard is hard and I can smooth the surface out better with my hands and when I glued the paper to all sides it looked great. The shit started when I applied the paint. Looks like it soaked the paper and you know what happens when the paper is soaked, it starts to deform. No matter how much I tried to apply the glue evenly it was still uneven so some spots started to bulge out as horrible bubbles, I had no way but to remove the paper layers and bring everything back to its original state which was pretty hard, you can imagine, removing glued paper from wood isn't easy.
In a conclusion, all that paper covering idea was pointless in this case because this exact turquoise paint has a very high hiding power and it doesn't really matter what is the color of the surface it's applied to.

But, in fact, the paper thing CAN work, I used a lot of paper elements with my previous piece and in this one too. The trick is the paper should be painted FIRST and then glued and varnished only afterwards.

Speaking of this paint, I had problems with it too. This is a very special and expensive French paint which is sold only in one biggest art store in my city. It's called iridescent paint, to put it simply it's a paint with metallic effect, like gold or silver paint, technically they're iridescent paints too. This effect is achieved by adding fine aluminum powder to a paint, so in fact any paint can be turned iridescent, there's even separate iridescent components sold to mix them with the paint you need. I was looking very hard for the perfect paint which can interpret this unreal digital cyan color of Zed Vector when I was working on my previous art piece, no shade of a classic turquoise looked satisfying for me, when I saw a tube of this Pebeo paint I got a hope that maybe this is what I need and god yes it was. Of course it doesn't look bright all the time but when a direct bright light shines on it it looks simply otherworldly.
But of course I ran out of my old tube and had to buy more. I grabbed the paint in a store without looking, applied it and what the hell, the shade was wrong. It was a bit darker, more turquoise rather than cyan, still a nice color but not what I need, especially when half of the stuff was already painted with old paint.
I compared two tubes to each other and dang, the shades are just SLIGHTLY different and my tube says "blue green" while the one I bought was "green blue", such a bullshit, could this text be any smaller? I just didn't expect this store to have such nuanced shades, there's a big selection of Pebeo paints in tubes of course but very few iridescent ones, gold, silver, red, green and something else I guess. And cyan. How could I think that they will have two nearly identical blue iridescent paints? That's why I took one without looking. Thanks god all my expenses are gonna be paid. Anyway, I had to waste my time and have a two hour ride to the store again just to buy a normal paint.

I had an issue with Zed's head as well. When it was just a box without eyes, brows and ears with only this wire hair, I painted it and applied the first layer of lacquer, it looked okay, 4 sides out of 5 felt fine but for some unknown reason the backside started to cover with horrible wrinkles.
I forgot to take a photo but I still have this layer separated from the plastic, the wrinkles smoothed a bit already but the texture still can be seen, just trust me that it looked even worse. I was very puzzled and bothered by this, it's not even like everything got turned into shit, it's just one cursed side being an ugly duckling among normal ones. I was making theories trying to understand the reason behind it but still wasn't sure about what could be the real cause. I left it and switched to working with other elements, started sanding another plastic surface (it's better to sand it with sanding paper for the paint to stick better to it, with surfaces too smooth the brush leaves smears and it takes more layers to make the color look even), suddenly the protective film started to ruffle under the sanding paper scratching it and I thought "Oh damn, this film again.... Wait. The fucking film!" with a sudden shock of a realization. Yes, these pvc plastic sheets I buy for such stuff have a practically invisible super thin film on one side which needs to be removed before working, I usually remove it only when the element is cut but for the first time I was neglecting it pretty often. After an experience like this I realized that I better remove the film all the time. I took Zed's head, hooked up the edge of the film and the whole thing was removed together with paint and lacquer on it as you can see above. A big waste of time and material but at least I knew the case, could fix the head by painting the side again and feel calm that nothing like this threatens other elements as long as I remove the film from them.

Nose was a big piece of shit to deal with too.

My first idea was to just buy a styrofoam egg in an art store, adjust the shape to a bit more spherical one by grinding it with sanding paper, paint it red and then varnish. And everything worked fine until I got to the varnishing part. I knew that acetone, solvents and some solvent-containing lacquers can dissolve styrofoam, of course, but I didn't know it can be done THROUGH 5 LAYERS OF ACRYLIC PAINT.
Here's the photo of what it turned the poor egg into.

I didn't want to use this plan B but I just had to. I cut 14 identical nose-shaped layers of plastic, glued them together and then had to sand it A LOT to give it a rounded shape. It could be more spherical with more layers but I did it more flat for two reasons. 1. Too much layers meant bigger weight and I was afraid to put a goddamn plastic boulder on the end of the long snout which was already adding quite an imbalance to the structure. The whole figure was a bit flattened and made to be perceived mainly from the front like a painting so a slightly flattened nose wasn't too bad. 2. I was simply too tired to cut two times more eggs from a sheet of plastic and then sand it for eternity.
There's also one reason why this idea is better, styrofoam egg turned out to be too too small anyway, almost 2 times smaller than the size needed.

This is how it looked before sanding, a big sandwich of plastic and glue. Thankfully, it was another solution which worked right.
And this is how I decided to attach the nose. Here you can see the inside of the snout resting upside down on its top side without bottom, a part of the wire was sticking out from Zed's snout to plant the nose on it and the other part was inside, stuck between pieces of cardboard and covered with glue to avoid any movement or anything worse.
Zed's hair was one of the easiest part and it worked out good just like I expected unlike many other things. I just bought a piece of thick wire in a rubber insulation, painted it hot pink, made two holes on top of Zed's head and put the ends of the wire in them, the ends were bent at 90 degrees for it to stand fixed. From the very beginning of thinking about future Zed Vector pieces in 2023 I knew I'm gonna use wire for his hair, there's no better way to do it.
Making tiny triangles for the zebra box was also one of the easiest processes but also one of the most brain-numbing, monotonous and time consuming.
Only in the very end of the whole process after all the stuff described above being done, a horrible realization came to me that I did a mistake in calculations and made Zebra box smaller than it should be. All other elements were the needed size but I realized it too late. It's not too horrible but it bothers me a lot because original concept has better proportions, it's like a classic bust with a massive pillar which supports it. It's not like the real piece is not stable, it stands well, it just looks a bit wrong compositionally as Zed Vector's figure dominates over the rest way too much. And letters took much more space this way too while I wanted to give more view of the zebra pattern on the front side.
This is why I decided to not glue Zed's figure to the stand. I hope that maybe one day I'll make a smaller version of Zed which will fit the stand proportions. This big one looks fine as a standalone piece by itself so I think it's okay to have it separate.

Btw, his square collar is simply a product of hard conditions limitating me. I wanted to make it round first but didn't know how to do it with a limited set of imperfect materials and tools I have then suddenly I thought about a square collar and said "The hell with that, Zed is all square and simplified, the collar can easily be square as well.", it was still a bit tricky but way easier than making a circular one and honestly I think it looks 10 times better and more interesting.

Curator obviously loved the result a lot, she was amazed. I barely managed to get in time, she said she will come to my place and pick my stuff at April 25 and this day I was still finishing the last details but I made it, packed it and now it's on its way to Moscow.

The good thing is I don't have to make a third piece. YES, my sufferings were supposed to continue after this one project because curator said 2 works are also not enough to present an artist on an exhibition so I had another deadline before May 5 when she had to do another trip to our city to gather more works. Thankfully, I don't have to. When she came yesterday, we had some talk about me and exhibition. She really wants to tie my exhibition pieces to my real personality and my actual art activity, you know, furry shit, but avoiding nsfw part as it's a 0+ age category exhibition and you know, with an artist like me it's ONE HELL OF A TASK.
But we scrolled through my gallery and found an old triptych of artworks I made in the very beginning of my furry activity 3 years ago featuring Bazil, Duster and Banditails. Drawing technique is primitive here compared to how I draw nowadays but with the overall aesthetics, fontwork and photo collage it still looks nice and she was very happy that she can exhibit something like this. She also liked some of my sfw pixel animations with my OCs and said she can try to view them on an exhibition through a video-frame.

Honestly, I already felt hyped and ready to make the third physical piece (especially when it's not me to pay for materials), I came up with a simple yet impressive idea featuring Jack Tallhead which wouldn't take that much time but whatever, I think it's only for good as I really wasted a lot of time already, leaving you guys without content, so it's really better to finally take a rest and get back to my regular nsfw stuff and especially commissions which I miss a lot. So many good comm requests are waiting for me and I just can't wait already to deal with them.

Exhibition opens in May 16, obviously I'm invited and will come there the same way as usual, wearing my flashy suit and talking about furry stuff (or at least trying to)

And one more remark for those who have read the previous post mentioning the exhibition and noticed my mention of The Art Newspaper Russia making a publication about this exhibition and a chance for me to get my furry stuff shown there. Well, it's not gonna happen :( You see, curator told it to my friend who also participates in this exhibition and he told it to me the way he understood it from her words. We thought the article will be made after the exhibition opening when good photos of all works can be taken and so on but no. Today everything is almost ready to be published, the publisher asked the curator to send them photos of the works several days ago and she sent just few she had because most artists don't have photos of their works hq enough to be printed. If only I knew, I had my TV piece hanging on my wall all this time and my friend who lives with me right now has a good camera by hand, I could take a photo like any fucking time. It was extremely disappointing and underwhelming and it devalued the whole thing for me, now the only good thing about all this stuff is that I got all the materials paid to make my very expensive fantasies real, I wasn't paid for all the time and energy I wasted on it while I could do commissions or Patreon content for real money but at least I got that part covered. I don't believe that this exhibition can bring any good changes to my life and as much as I love this curator as a person I also can't believe her words that "this is a very good step in your promotion". What kind of promotion it will be? More people will look for my p0rn? Subscribe to my Patreon? Commission big sexy pieces from me? I don't want to promote myself as an sfw artist, don't want to be perceived as one, don't want people to demand more stuff like this from me, I perceive myself as a sexual artist, more than that, a homosexual artist, and want to be perceived and promoted as one which is impossible in a homophobic country where LGBT became illegal at the legislative level and branded as "extremism", not to mention simply social and cultural problems of Russia having some inferiority problems or whatever, sexual art is not really welcomed here, so I have no faith in Russian art society, I don't want to be an active part of it, I became an ugly duckling for it since I switched to furry p0rn. It's not America which has an art museum made entirely for sexual artwork, exhibiting in a place like this sounds more like a proper dream for me. I'm making exceptions only for this curator because she is a rare individual who accepted my real furry self and expresses a sincere interest to it, and of course because she is ready to pay at least for the materials and takes all the exhibition business on herself. But she is exceptional, most people are not like that, seeing me on the exhibition won't give them even 50% of the picture of my personality as an artist and they WON'T be glad to know the rest of it to say the least. And I don't like such perspective.

But sorry, it was just me ranting as usual, there's still a good side, I finished a great piece which is another testament of my overwhelming love for the 80-90s aesthetic, it was done not without big help from aside and it's gonna be seen by many people in one of Moscow's oldest art spaces which is the first such experience for me, even if it doesn't mean much from a practical point of view. For me this piece also feels like another good step in promoting my own characters, I want them to be more widely known, at least inside the furry fandom, but for this I need to put way more effort in it.
I feel a big weight finally lifted off my shoulders now. Ever since I agreed to participate I felt stressed by this feeling of responsibility, promise and debt, also the fear of not being paid for all the materials I wasted if I don't make it in time and fail because no result means no participation in exhibition and no payment because it's not their business if I haven't given them what they needed in the end. I enjoyed these months and enjoyed making my own furry stuff meanwhile but all that exhibition thing was like an unpleasant background noise. Now I'm free and can only think about nothing but my own art.