This design had to be put together off the ducting because of the many slender parts. The design emerged over a couple of hours over several days. We sprayed it regularly with water as we worked. Once we had the design we liked, we rolled it onto the ducting. Unlike solid ducting casts, we left the ducting straight out.

Early days. Glad the yellow blocks came & went.

The final version.
The piece is on no-see-um screening which lies on top of plastic sheeting. The no-see-um keeps the piece from “sticking” to the plastic & thus making it much easier to manipulate as quickly & fluidly as we need to when working up a design. The black ink lines on the plastic do not represent the ducting, but instead a “homemade” ducting mold we made for this piece. We’ll do a post on that mold in a future post. You’ll be able to see why putting this design on it was not going to happen.

Each evening, we covered it with plastic. When the still-wet design was finished and well fingernail-pressed together, we put a layer of methyl cellulose on both sides. The methyl took a few hours to soak in enough that we could transfer the final design to the ducting.

Barbara straightening and neatening the design after we rolled it on. After stencil brushing the wet paper into place, we started putting the magnets on.

The transfer was easy. The design was on a sheet of plastic & no-see-um. We laid the ducting on top and wrapped the plastic around ducting. We rolled the ducting until the design was topside and removed the plastic & no-see-um.

The piece needed many more magnets than a continuous design. Every place where the strips were not attached to each other was going to dry with a mind of its own. That was asking for a colorful piece of beef jerky. The narrower the strip, the more magnets per squ inch. You can also see the solid area of lime, white and pink stripes needed very few magnets.