Ode to Frog and Toad by RyanOQuinn

Last crawled date: 3 years, 3 months ago

Last summer I worked from my home in the rural lowcountry of South Carolina. My desk was right by the back door with the tree-line 30ft away, so I usually took my bathroom breaks among the pines. For several evenings, I noticed what appeared to be the same two amphibians perched outside my door, hunting in the light from inside. It was a treefrog, always on the door's glass, and a toad, always on the doorstep below. Though they may not have known it, I enjoyed their company, and we had a mutually beneficial relationship. They didn't have to do anything, they were just there, and that made me happy. One night I composed a few lines to commemorate this kinship, coupled it with pictures of the duo, edited it all together in LunaPic, and voila.
I was already doing another woodworking project at the time, so I decided to go off on a tangent to make a frame for this work. I salvaged the sapwood from some white cedar to make it. The boards were all sawed, planed, and sanded by hand. The frame was glued together with milk glue, partially for fun and biodegradability, and partially because I didn't realize we had wood glue on hand. The backing was cut from scrap plywood paneling and 6 wood screws were used to fasten it because it was quite warped. The frame was sanded and finished with 2 coats of tung oil.
The picture itself was simply printed from a desktop printer and attached to a cardboard canvas (notepad backing) via milk glue. The canvas and picture were then brushed with several coats of milk glue, using up the rest and attempting to stiffen and protect the canvas. The results of this technique were surprisingly nice. The glue gives a nice translucent depth and really masks the fact that it's just printer paper and cardboard. The glue also hardened and cracked to form a cool organic pattern like stained glass.
The picture and frame represent South Carolina and my roots well, with sources including
From the lowcountry:
• frog and toad
• milk glue from an aunt's spoiled milk
• wood screws from a grandfather
• plywood paneling from a parents' shed
• cardboard backing from a pad of construction paper that's been in the family for as long as memory serves
From the upstate:
• white cedar salvaged from neighboring apartments
• wire for hanging
• a home to hang in
Although the pictures are .ai files, I did not use Illustrator to make it, I just converted it to .ai to satisfy the Thingiverse file type requirements. It is simply a .png in .ai form.