I’ve had my shoulder up against things, pushing to get work accomplished, and I have more to show for it! Here we have another super-cool video of a great piece I did as part of a fundraiser for the National Kidney Foundation. It’s called “The Good Bean” (lots of health professionals refer to kidneys in slang as “beans,” so there ya go!), and the frame is shaped to mimic the NKF’s logo.

You always want to produce something that is going to please people, make them happy and proud to be the caretaker of your work. Smaller sculptures can sometimes be a challenge, just because they are brief, and you can’t do things like broad, sweeping curves or extremely tall coils and the like. I wanted to come up with a little something that would set this one off and make it unique.

The answer came in the form of the widening track drop-through, the part where the marble rolls out to the end of the straight piece of track, and just when you think it’s going to shoot right off the end, it slips between the rails and drops down onto the track below it. This can be a very tough element to get functioning properly, as it’s all about the tolerances, and as I’ve mentioned before, marbles are neither round nor the same size. Since I was working with a single marble, this suddenly made the whole deal a lot easier, and I knew this element would be the perfect highlight for “The Good Bean.”

Not to neglect the rest of the sculpture, I created some very nice curves plus a pretty darn large spiral that took ten feet of wire to create. The end result is a really fabulous desktop piece. The woman who won the contest is very happy to have received it, and I’m glad it went to someone who will get lots of enjoyment out of it.

Check out the video below to get the real effect. Please feel free to contact me if you’d like to discuss a piece for yourself. I’d be happy to discuss the possibilities.