Day 350

Here is my Breaking Bad crayon which is my favorite carving I've done so far. I loved the show so I was looking forward to giving this a try. The gun behind the back was inspired by the pose Jesse has on the Breaking Bad wallpaper I have on my desktop. I think it's a nice extra touch and adds some asymmetry. My favorite part is probably the zipper. I'm not sure where I got the idea to carve in the individual teeth of the zipper, but I'm glad I did. I'm really happy with how the whole carving turned out and funny enough, it's not really that hard to make. For a lot of the other crayons I do, I have to be very precise about everything. But here, it's a guy in a baggy yellow jumpsuit so I can carve away without having to look at reference images. For this carving, I obviously had to add in a lot of other colors via melting which seems difficult. However it's mostly small areas of color so it wasn't that bad. I figured this would be a good example to explain some of the finer points of melting wax.

This carving used three melted wax application techniques. The first is adding a bulk amount of wax to the surface of the carving. This includes the hands, gun and pink filters. These structures did not exist on the initial carving. I added in the melted wax drop by drop until the bulk of wax was large enough and then I carved that to the desired result. This is in contrast to the shoes and the mound of blue meth. Both of these structures were initially carved into the yellow crayon. Here the melted wax was brushed onto the surface almost like paint. Instead of a bulk, a thin layer of wax is applied. This technique is useful for coloring a large area but it's much more prone to color bleeding which is when the melted wax ends up melting the solid wax it is being applied to. This bleeding isn't that noticeable when adding a bulk of wax because it ends up getting covered by more wax. It's harder to hide with a thin layer though. For the blue meth, I place a layer of white first and then a layer of blue on top of that to minimize the yellow bleeding into the blue to turn it green. The last technique is carving into the surface of the crayon and then filling that empty space with melted wax. This was used for the white and black of the gas mask. The black wasn't simply placed on top of the yellow. I carved in grooves and then filled those grooves with the melted black wax. Then I carved it smooth so it was flush with the yellow wax. The rules of bleeding wax still apply though which why the white has a yellow tinge to it. 

  

When I finished the crayon, I remembered that I had a small chemistry flask and thought I could use it to hold the crayon. But the flask ended up being too big. I was still enamored with this idea, so I went online and ordered smaller flasks. They were the smallest ones I could find and they still ended up being too big. My brother had a centerpiece from a wedding he recently attended. It was filled with slightly blue broken glass pieces. So I took those and put them in the flask to elevate the crayon above the rim. The glass isn't quite as blue as the meth on the show but I think it all works well together.