100 Layers

Surprisingly lightweight, the final result was something between a bouquet of balloons and a giant sea anemone.

50 sheets drying

I decided to go for four colors of paint, making 25 layers of each color. We started with the pink and green paint. After an hour, it was getting dark, cold, and windy (windy is fatal for spray painting sheets of seaweed) so we called it a day. The garage was too cold and the paint wasn't drying. I had to relocate the layers of paint into my bathroom.

Seaweed sheets, pre-paint

The black asphalt of my driveway here was the background for my player photograph. This driveway is coming in handy for more tasking than I would have imagined.

First coat of paint

Technically, since each of the pink and green sheets required two coats for coverage, I guess I have 150 layers of paint.

Applying the second coat of pink

Springtime and spraypaint

Between one thing and another, it was months before we had a chance to finish painting the blue and gold layers. It was much warmer, but also fairly breezy, which resulted in a fair amount of chasing layers of paint that went blowing in the wind.

Psssst

Make your own foil

I really like how the gold layers came out. It was like making your own aluminum foil. Except golden, and seaweed textured.

Basic shape #1, the cone

The big question was how to apply the paint and seaweed layers to a canvas. I wanted to make something three dimensional and considered cutting up the paint into strips and weaving them into a crazy shaped basket. But it seemed like cutting up a layer of paint would violate the unit's integrity. I wanted to apply 100 layers, not 1000 strips of paint. So I settled on making each layer into a small three dimensional shape and then stacking them together into a big pile on a canvas. Most of the shapes were cones, with a few rolls and hat/boat shapes thrown in.

Glue gun

This was key

100 layers await

5 layers

10 layers

15 layers

20 layers

25 layers

49 layers

Alas, I discovered that I'd left 11 layers of blue at Listener's garage.

58 layers

The hat/boat shapes were nice for capping the open ends of the cones.

78 layers

88 layers

All that remained was to incorporate 10 more blue shapes (rolls) and to finish putting on the 1 blue shape and 1 pink shape that was still missing.

100 layers

The room smelled faintly of roasted seaweed and paint, and there were little flakes of both scattered about.