Tag Archives: completed

New Sculpture Video: “The Good Bean” National Kidney Foundation Fundraiser

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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.

New Sculpture Video! It’s a Ringer.

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I am excited to report that I have recently completed a small rolling ball sculpture. This piece had several new challenges for me. For starters, it is a very small piece, measuring 6″x11.5″x6.5″. That’s not a lot of space in which to make things interesting! To accomplish that I used several pieces of scrap steel that I claimed out of the scrap heap at work. Visually, this piece has some real fun stuff going on.

Secondly, the sculpture is composed entirely of mild steel, which means it will rust if not coated with something that serves as a moisture barrier. I could have used standard paint, but that would wear away after a while where the marble rolls. Plus, regular paint just isn’t what I wanted to use, and I didn’t want it to change the color of the metal. I really wanted it to not look like it was painted! It took some internet searching, some phone calls, some driving, plus a little hit-and-miss investigation, but I feel fortunate to have found a place that was actually excited about taking on my odd little challenge to them: “See, it has this marble that rolls around, and the marble hits one part and rings. It has to keep that ring even after it has been painted.” They actually got a kick out of that whole idea, gave me a nice trial price to allow me to test their electrostatic paint process, and I’m pleased to say this thing looks fantastic! You can’t tell it has been painted, and the ring is great! Things went so well I am planning on doing a series of these pieces priced right around $175.

At any rate, I’ll let the video fill in all the blanks. Likely you are really curious to see what I’m fussing about.