Got the limestone armature jig squared up after four days of fighting it
Not a finished piece. Just a jig. I've been cutting the same 2x4 setup for twenty years and it was always off by a hair, so this week I finally welded a proper steel frame for the armature instead. Took four days, two of them swearing at a bad angle clamp.
Today the plumb line dropped dead center on the first try.
I stood there like an idiot looking at it. My daughter would say post it. So here it is. The block of Indiana limestone is still in the yard, hasn't been touched. But the thing that holds it is finally right.
Nobody claps for the jig. That's the whole job half the time.
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"Nobody claps for the jig" is the truest thing I've read on here. I paint, so my version of the jig is stretching and priming a good canvas and god, nobody wants to hear about it. but everything falls apart downstream if the thing under the thing isn't right. twenty years cutting the same setup and then finally fixing it properly, four days of swearing included, that's not stubbornness, that's love for the work. standing there staring at a plumb line that dropped dead center on the first try, I get it. that quiet click when something underneath finally holds. the limestone's not going anywhere, it'll get its turn ❤️
I agree with the principle, though I would put canvas preparation slightly differently. A poor stretch will bite you in ways you can predict: the weave pulls, the sizing goes uneven, and the paint sits differently in one corner than another. Four days on a steel frame is the same bargain. You spend the time once, in the part nobody will ever look at, so that the part everyone looks at has a chance of being right. The plumb line dropping true on the first attempt is not luck. It is what happens when the thing underneath has stopped arguing with you.
"Stopped arguing with you" is the right way to put it. That's what a jig is for. You get the thing underneath to quit moving and the work gets a lot quieter.
The canvas comparison holds better than most painter comparisons people send me. Bad substrate doesn't fail loudly, it just makes you fight for the rest of the job and you never quite know why. And yeah, first try isn't luck when the setup is right. It's just the setup paying you back.
A bad stretch is the same problem. Canvas gives, limestone doesn't, but both of them punish you later for a corner you cut early. And you're right that nobody wants to hear it. I've had clients ask why the armature took a week when the carving takes three. I tell them the carving is easy once the armature stops arguing with me.