.
Ah, THIS is what I’ve been going after. I think this is finally a photo that feels different for me. I guess it’s a lighting thing. It started with the dirty salt shaker, and now we have this. It’s possible that something may finally be happening with my photography. I hope. I don’t know, but I hope! I don’t know quite how I did this (other than a couple of obvious things), but I hope I can do it and do it better further down the road.
.
Here are some more efforts from me on the caricature “monster car” drawing style that was typical of shirt and decal designs of the sixties and seventies. To the left you can see a couple of examples of the sort of thing I’m aiming toward. This stuff was first popularly made known by a guy named Ed Roth, although it had been going on in one form or another for a few years prior. Roth was the guy that put it out in the public eye on a wide scale. Later on Roth concentrated on building his crazy show car creations like the Mysterion, and he left the shirt design in the capable hands of guys like Ed Newton.
I’ve always enjoyed art like that, but never figured I could hack that. These days I don’t much care if I can be the best, at least not enough to stop me from at least trying to have some fun with it. These are pretty amateur efforts, but they are still fun, and it seems that the second and third drawings are slightly better than the first, so there may be hope for me yet. I may not be another Ed Newton, but maybe I can at least get to the point where someone looks at the picture and goes, “Cool…what kind of car is that supposed to be?”
.
The one on the right is looking pretty sweet by now. This evening we finished up the separate pieces of that project, so there wasn’t a way to switch on and off on it. To give both of us something to do, we decided to start another project and swap between the two. I pulled out a scrap that was sitting around and seemed to be of a size that we could finish the two projects at about the same time. I started the design while Jem colored on the larger piece, then she added her own design work to the smaller one while I traded off and did color on the larger piece. I think Jem did some amazing color work on the smaller one. We’re tossing around different ideas on how we want to use color in the future, and I’ve purchased a few different supplies to help us out on some things later. This just keeps getting more and more interesting.
.
Did I say I was finished with this? I think I did…the other day. Maybe? Silly me. I can never stop improving something. In this photo there’s one improvement that’s readily viewable, and that’s the little leg there at the lower right corner. You can even see I haven’t soldered it in place yet. I removed the simple spiraled curl that had previously been the terminus of the whole shebang, and I added a ramp to that last spiral and had it curve around to the lower right there. Nice, eh? Makes it a lot easier for little kids to get at the marbles and put them back up top for another trip.
Next up is to have dad help me make a nice wood base for it.
.
Fourth installment by my count on this particular project. Jem came over tonight, and we worked on adding more color to our drawings. They’re coming along a lot faster than we’d thought they would. She wasn’t mad that I’d worked on the one a little bit. I still feel I’m a little behind, but I asked, and she said it was okay if I worked on it just a little more before we get together again. They’re looking pretty good now, but it’s still hard to tell what they’ll look like when they’re completely finished. We’re already starting to try and think of new ideas for the next project, though!
Oh, the weekend I had, kids! It was all set to be a bang-up, creative-filled weekend, and by golly if I didn’t just shoot the moon on that one!
The big ingredient in all of this madness was the lack of gigs this weekend. Usually the band plays both nights, if not just a Saturday. It’s not often I get two nights off on a weekend. In addition, I also had very few personal obligations this weekend. No one was getting married, baptized, bailed out, or otherwise taking part in some sort of activity that demanded my presence for very long. Well, someone had a birthday, and I showed for that, but it was for a (still very young!) old friend. Good times and merriment were had.
But back to the other merriment, my merriment. With the weekend free of gigs, I spent most of Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday afternoon hunched over my workbench in the basement, floodlights ablaze, brow furrowed in concentration, and I made stuff. Pliers, wire, torch, solder, flux, wood, Dremel – I was a dynamo, I tell you! A friggin’ dynamo! You want proof? No problem!
View from the top.
Side shot.
Another top shot with four spirals mounted.
Top three-quarter view. Nice waterfall effect here.
Here’s a three-quarter view on the left giving a sense of the flowing path the marble will have – or at least I like to hope. The switchback effect from the second spiral to the third comes from the fact that spiral number two rotates counterclockwise, while all the other spirals go clockwise. I thought this would be clever and fun when I did it, but after I started assembling the whole thing I realized just how much harder it made things by switching the direction of the entrance and exit ramps. Yes, oh-so-clever me. I made it work, but it required a lot of figuring and scowling. I would do the same sort of thing again, but I think it would work better on a larger sculpture where I had more room to manipulate the changes in track direction.
Spock's martini glass is starting to look less like a martini and more just plain...groovy.
Well, it wasn’t the whole night, but it felt like it constituted the bulk of my activity for last evening, so there ya go.
I told myself once again that I was going to dedicate one hour of my evening to doing sculpture. This program seems to be producing results, so I’m sticking with it. Yestereve (it’s not a word, but, eh…) I had gotten two coils bent and gotten most of one spiral formed. Last night it was dauntingly simple: make more spirals. The plain simple obviousness of what needs to be done, the real work rather than the planning or figuring or talking about it feels intimidating, but I went back to the prayers from the day before, and I was on my way.
After only an hour of work I had this:
Woohoo! Sweet! Five spirals of varying sizes. They look nifty, don’t they? I think they turned out quite nicely, if I do say so my humble self. I tested a marble on all of them, and it looks like they’ll serve pretty well just the way they are, although some minor tweaking will likely result during the rest of the build. The exit ramps are a bit touchy for me as well, but I’ll have time to fuss with that later.
It’s incredibly satsifying to be able to crank out some complete sections like this in one sitting. A lot of RBS building involves gradually piecing together sections over a period of time, sections and elements that can’t be tested or used until a certain point is reached. It can feel like no progress is being made. Last night it was easy to see the progress in my work. I value those moments. Perhaps I’ll come back and read this entry some time when I’m knee-deep in soldering together support braces or some similarly necessary yet time-sucking and not so fun task.
My big issue now is I’m not sure how to integrate the spirals as a whole. I’ve come up with a couple of different ideas, but not I’m not married to one or the other just yet. They kind of look like little flower blooms, don’t they? Hmmm… Stay tuned, it’s getting interesting!
