Feats of Derring Do

Have some highlights of what I currently have been working on:

First the three samples of the pop cans sewn to hand dyed fabric and:

the final piece. I think they came out alright and I am certainly well practiced in the tedium of sewing and drilling pop can aluminium to fabric now.

After 18 hours of cut out work I finally riveted together this fan and decided to forgo putting the wrist chain on it.

After a few more hours it has acquired a castle shaped box to sit in as well. Now the explanation for this is simple, the cut out pattern on each blade reminded me of fireworks and how at the end of most Super Mario levels or games there are always fireworks, usually over Bowser's castle or even sometimes over Princess Peach's. Case in point the end boss fight of Super Mario World (4:45 in this video):

Therefore the title of this piece is Fireworks Over the Castle and will make it into my video game themed senior show.

As for actual jewelry class work the flower shield pendant is coming along slowly but steadily. after some soldering and refinement of the tabs this piece will be ready to patina a bright blue. But, right now the top half untintentionally looks like Majora's Mask:

of the N64 game of the same name, which I never really got into. There will always be time later for that sort of thing though. The mountain of games I have to play through is faintly ridiculous now.

Finally in wood, there's this little 12 inch by 4 inch by 4 inch abstract sculpture I've just put an oil with a walnut stain on. Loosely based on some curving pine needles I found and well, that's it really.

No time for videos unfortunatley but here's a nifty picture of all the copper dust and scraps from the fan at least....

Opening Stress

So. Hi. Due to the rather zany nature of this semester these posts will be in the dump and run vein content wise since I have my senior show coming up in early May. On with the progress shots!

 

Fibers, Junior Studio in which we are creating two fans, one functional, one not. above is the protoype of the fucntional one and below the two and a third blades I've cut out of sheet copper to make it. It takes me roughly three hours per blade, with out any filing or clean up on it, but I've recieved several compliments on how pretty the pieces are, so its motivation enough to put in the eighteen hours plus of work on it. Thus far I have been trying to keep pace by cutting out at least one a day, and I hope to be in good shape after this weekend.

 

The non functional fan is being cut out of pop cans into these interwoven shapes that will be sewn to a canvas carefully in the elaborate pattern on the bottom. I can't decide what back ground color to use with the final cans and a few other technicalities so I'm left doing the Fibers professor's perennial advice of "Just keep swimming."

On to Jewelry. Since most of my time is being taken up by cutting out the fan parts, most of my plans are still stuck in the idea phase. I have the sketch above for a pin or pendant that will have Lego flowers riveted to it, and a very purse like idea for the Super Scope reciever below which was part of a bad purchase of video game related goods at a garage sale event.

Despite all of my current stress, my mood has been improved considerably by this lovely music video on the relationship between Norway and America. Quite catchy, isn't it?

Christmas CAD

I've been muddling through Rhino 5.0 and Flamingo nXt attempting to make my lovely jewelry objects look pretty and becoming fustrated that the version is just different enough that it feels like I'm relearning everything, and everything I do make doesn't look as good as it should. But, let's begin with what I have worked out, with the example of my arrow rings. The above image is rendered with Rhino's built in renderer as compared to...

How Flamingo does it. I assure you nothing has changed between these two images other than the renderer. Flamingo images will always have more light in them by default.

 

 

The other new(ish) thing with Flamingo nXt is that it will keep making passes over the rendered image, attempting to smooth out the shadows each time until you tell it to stop or set a limit. Here I let the program do three passes. Notice how blurry the shadow are on the yellow ring in front especially set against the single pass image below it.

Another advantage of sorts with nXt is that they dumped in a ton of background options, or at least made them much easier to access. No longer is it necessary to create an infinity cyc by manually putting a curved surface behind your object you can instead set the background to be a two or three color gradient or an image. I tested it out going from black to white in the background of this earring and human shaped display prop I made.

Lights and reflectivity are still a huge problem and perhaps are even worse in this program. No matter what I do the lights are still too bright in Flamingo and over expose the hell out of it. This was perhaps the most aesthetically pleasing mistake because it sort of looks like the old PS3 game Mirror's Edge, which I never have played.

While I work out how to light and render shiny objects I'm building a few more complex ones now that im a little more into the Rhino groove. At this point I swear "sweep rail" must be my favorite command to do.


Well it's back to the virtual drawing board to see what else I can work out by my deadline! Ciao!

End of the Year Clean Up

Probably ought to do a little end of the year wrap up on my semester, so lets break it down by class.

CAD: Nothing changed since the last post, look for more stuff by the end of January.

Jewelry:

A sad looking drum that needs revamping when it comes to the head. But I have a plan for fixing it later....

And the whole shebang for this semester. Rather disappointing isn't it? It was a bit of a bad semester all around for everyone in the class though, blargh. Hopefully the next go around will be better.

Fibers has eight of my 10 samples here for the final project and

a blurry cell phone picture of the final piece. It's about the Albright-Knox and how the classical architecture is at odds with the modern art in it. The columns are trying to contain the art (or the art is trying to break out). Anyway, the columns growing over the background remind me of the Konami shooter Lifeforce in which your piloting a ship through some sort of organic thing with walls that grow and get in your way.

 

 

Since they are so far back in the top image have some exclusive images of my two favorite samples. First is a nice modern art looking one that was the basis for the final (and also looks better) and the second one has a nice japanese garden railing reflecting in the pond look to it. All in all a great year for me in fibers; I'm tentatively looking forward to the next class im taking in it.

 

Digital Methods: the less said about it the better I suppose but heres some stuff anyway,

 

Random ad I had to cobble together into photoshop.

Stupid illustrator tools.

The silly old southwestern chair hut.

Probably the best pieces from the class are these laser cut cloud earrings. I'm happiest with how these came out despite the bad glue job, would laser cut again etc, etc. Which means I ought to look into buying an Adobe Suite, especially when coupled with the fact my copy of Photoshop is three versions out of date.

Overall its been a a fairly good semster in all the classes that aren't directly concerning jewelry, funny how that happened. Since I am in a celebratory mood and it's nearly Christmas let's end with OCRemix again and a Mario/Christmas music medly:

 



CADverision

Waaay back over Thanksgiving I did get into Rhino CAD, finally, and here are the results:

First is an arrow ring I attempted to make in wax with little success and here I'm all happy it has no naked edges and can be 3D printed.

And the Nacell Ring, rather based off the Starship Enterprise. This is another one I attempted to build in real life which didn't work at all, especially since I attempted it in brass to scale (scale being that it's a size 7 ring with 4 mm stones).

A laser cut idea that I never got around to and was suprisingly fiddly to build in CAD, mostly because I couldn't just duplicate one of the trapezoidal shaped parts to the earring and scale it, I had to rebuild large portions that refused to join right for some reason. Eventually I did get it to work right though.

This is the other idea I've got for some laser cut earrings that I never had time to do so why not do it in CAD?

When you're left to your own devices in a 3D program, shit gets wierd. I made these goofy earrings by simply getting bored and messing about in the program and I think they look kinda stupid because of it. Evidently I need to go in with a plan or a sketch or attempt to duplicate a real life object instead of trying to start with Rhino first.

Obviously I never got a chance to render these with the crushing weight of my other studios, so that's the next step, in addition to building a few more interesting jewelry pieces. Not a very vibrant update really on what I've been doing so here's a gaint water balloon popping in slow motion:

That'll do.

Fibres! Fibres!

Well I attempt to relax over Thanksgiving a bit, I have been trying to come up with a pattern to deconstructively screen print on the last project. Due to time constraints and other issues it has been cut down to ten 12 inch by 12 inch samples and on a three by five foot final piece.

We are also to continue to work with our assigned building and the whole City Bits/ City Bytes theme, but I've really run out of ideas on how to use the Albright-Knox in a different way than on my devore project.

Since I want to involve the sculpture Light Matrix that sits on top of the Albright -Knox addition more in this piece than I did the last one, I went to the master of using dots, Maurce Binder's opening for Dr. No in 1962. Trivia time, the electronic beeping in the very beginning with the producer's credits is supposed to represent that Bond is a spy for the computer age. And, the dots themselves are actually price stickers stop motion animated.

Factoidial knowledge aside, I have sketches like these follwing themes as far afield as Space Invaders
 and geology, but little to do with the art museum and Greco-roman revival architecture.

I'm no closer to an acceptable design for the final, but at least I've had fun going through all the old Bond intros.

And what are the Side Projects?

The darling side projects are:

A Decipticon logo pin as a birthday present for a friend,

A commision for a Jupiter Pendant with the possiblity of more in the,

 

Student Sale which is happening in early December for which I have to prepare my summer production pieces for.

Well, one bit on the main project for jewelry. It will be an extremely tight schedule but I hope to smith a small toy drum for what else, the toy project in jewelry. Observe sketches! 

 

 



Since I don't want to keep filling the ending musical noise video with just various iterations of video game back ground music lets have some random Japanese animation from 1933! The plot as far as I can gather is that a Fox (disguised as a samurai) and a Tanuki (with his father) try to outwit each other in an abandoned temple. I do love classic old animation and, hey look at this bonus remix some one made about old cartoons.

 



 

And from there I guess I am obliged to post Disney's infamous Silly Symphony from 1929, The Skeleton Dance.

 



I'm going to have to stop myself before I post the entirety of early animation history here.