A Taste of Your Own Medicine Cabinet

And here it is, the moment you've all been waiting for. The epic conclusion to the Cabinet of Quelala Trilogy. I say epic, but... Y'know... They said that about Return of the Jedi too...

THIS movie...

 We started the day off right, by doing something I'm not going to tell you about. Gonna have a fun little easter egg for you fans, and it's sort of ruined if we point it out. But after THAT was done... Well, we gave the green table a fresh coat of spray-paint. It was getting ratty. But after THAT we got back into the cabinet business. Since we were spray-painting anyway, and we'd need to wait for them to dry, we gave our shiny brass cabinet hardware a rusty paint-job.

Because it was easier than waiting out thirty years of rainy weather.

While that was drying, we went inside to do something a little special for the door. Remember I mentioned that the outrageously expensive antique cabinet supposedly had the faint outline of a woman on the front? Well that gave us the inspiration to put a monkey on the front of our cabinet. We figured that even though our own monkeys will be very different, we'd go with a Denslow Monkey drawing. Sort of like the artist was going on myths and legends and had never seen the real monkeys before.

This required a Denslow image for reference. Sean and I went through the whole book, and didn't find anything that would really fit on our very vertical cabinet door. We found one with a good monkey body and one with good monkey wings, I stitched them together in Photoshop, and Sean printed it out.

Be respectful. Apparently he's a Civil War veteran...

We needed to print it so Sean could do a little technique he picked up in art school. He first rubbed charcoal on the back of the paper.

Every good artist has his black period...

And then traced around the more prominent lines of the drawing.

Call him TRACE Adkins, amirite!?!? No..?

When he removed the paper he had a pretty decent reproduction of some of the original drawing. of course, if you were to sneeze it would be gone.

That which holds the image of a monkey becomes itself a monkey.

So he traced over it with a brush pen, and then filled in the details, creating a more permanent, more complete, Denslow monkey on the cabinet door.

We got ourselves a regular Spencer TRACY over here!

The next step was to ruin our clean, pretty wood. For that we used black shoe polish, applied it to a rag and gave the lucky furniture a vigorous, invasive rub-down. Then I had to put the camera down so I could help him hammer the tiny nails into the tiny hinges and screw in the handle for the door.

After that, we took some cheap scented candles we'd bought the other night and arranged them on top of the cabinet. We both took turns digging troughs into the tops of the bigger candles, lit them, and then had a LOT of fun running the lighter all over them, melting them down, scorching them, and making a waxy mess.

Try this at home, kids. It's awesome.

And then, after almost three days and too many friggin' hours, the cabinet was finished. And not looking half-bad. Well, looking half-bad, but in ways that we wanted it to.

We're now holding a vigil for our sanity. We have candles...

I guess it wouldn't be a cabinet-related journal entry if I didn't remind you all that this is a two-shot prop we spent half our week on... Two... Shots... But it's done now, and in time for the Witch shoot tomorrow! For which there will be a massive entry. So be anticipatory, please. For me...