It's that little moment in between projects where you're finished or close to it and haven't quite figured out exactly what to do for the next one so this magical thing called time, or at least the illusion of it, appears.
I have been trying to use the time efficently to get a head on designing eye wear but I am having much more trouble than expected. See I have the concept, I have the lens I want to build it around, I just can't come up with the design! Above is the closest I've gotten to a coherent design but I have no idea what to do for the arms of the glasses, and I am getting off concept of my whole virtual reality thing.
While I try to salvage my glasses idea (I am seriously considering the application of LEDs) I have also been throwing a bunch of cylinders on the wheel in ceramics and am so very very close to finishing my metalsmithing project. The bowl fits into the base at least and yes, I did forget to take pictures of the whole thing too. I'll have more images to deliever next week or so when I'm hoping to get a lot of art stuff straightened out, among other things, so I can plow through and maybe even finish something early!
I stayed up late in the studio last night with this as one of many motivational songs that really explains how it all works the night before a due date.
And here is the final piece, which I totally forgot to take a picture of on a model. But it is based on Pac-man and the idea of level 256 where the arcade game glitches out, hence that large 3D mutated Pac-man with wires and Parcheesi pieces "power pills" coming out of its mouth. This part also sits on the back of the back of the neck so that the piece is all normal looking in the front until you walk around to the back where there is the wild and crazy thing. It is also a box clasp type closure that mostly works, yay for beginner's luck on that one!
I'm fairly satisfied with it, so far as it came out exactly as I had planned it to, but there are little quirks about it that bug me, mostly under neath the heading of craftsmanship. Still it's on to the next which is proving to be harder to design than I thought it would be...
This post has been percolating for at least two weeks for your enjoyment; since I keep having to revise it again and again because so many art projects became due all at once. First the fun stuff: somehow I came across this link to a 87 minute documentary on hulu called Chasing Ghosts: Beyond The Arcade. Though not the best documentary, it did explain to me a lot about Twin Galaxies, Walter Day's desire to keep track of arcade high scores, and a good portion of where are they now for the guys who had the top scores.
Through the interviews you get a sense of what the arcade culture was like and their perspective on how and why it died so abruptly (Home gaming surpassing the arcade as well as rougher clientele showing up to arcades). It's still difficult to imagine what arcades were like having missed that entire period of video gaming history but virtue of having been born in the 90s, but it sounds awesome.
While not "researching" games I have been camping out in the studio working on a few things and completing things at a rate that feels way too slow at times.
CAD class at least is quite fun and I completed the first project a while ago, which is this sweet wind up robot. I thought I was on to something different with my color scheme, but alas looking around the Internet there is at least one retro tin wind up robot with the same green, red, and yellow. At least the design is different, toy makers and sci-fi filmmakers didn't base too many robots on an egg shape (Robbie the Robot comes closest).
Next is ceramics, which is still not a favorite medium of mine. The left is a coil built vessel with red and black slip with sgrafitto in it, post improvements. My snake pot came out of the raku firing well (middle picture) but it didn't clean up as well as I would have liked (right picture) the snake was supposed to be a blue-green, but I guess I didn't slap on enough layers of glaze. At least it looks kinda ancient? Anyway on to Metalsmithing...
Where my angle raised vessel is almost the shape I want it so I can start worrying about building the base and ordering some super special awesome materials for it. I got a good start on the catenoid, though I get the feeling I'm doing it wrong, judging by the interesting blisters I some how gave my self hammering it and the charming surface cracks it developed. It's now a gamble as to how complete this will be by the due date since I have been focusing most of my time on jewelry.
I have the chain together and I just got the clasp soldered together last night. Tonight I have to round up some two part epoxy in order to add my last minute decorative doodads to the clasp. The cheese grater holes inside Pac-man's mouth will have a rats nest of colorful wires glued in; left over from when I dismantled three Genesis controllers to make a little model chair for intro to 3D Design. The big copper loop will get a cut in it so I can string on wooden Parcheesi pieces, spaced out by brass tubing, which will also conveniently cover the break in the wire.
Now provided I don't get distracted by attempting to beat lousy and unusual games in the the Pac-man franchise or by such paltry thing as sleep or dinner I should be able to finally finish this necklace and get on to designing the VR glasses.
I have a Tumblr account mostly because a friend of mine discovered the site about a year ago. I'll spare the world and not link to mine, since its is mostly regurgitation of stuff already on there and very little original content (one of my few posts was linking to this small play through of an indie roguelike shooting game thing that I still haven't had a chance to play though you can download it free here.) But, if you find the right blogs to follow on Tumblr you can find some cool art and inspiration for your own work like:
These awesome rings by Sarah Hood who's website is here. She appears to do a lot of work with organic forms and I like the simple and clean layout of her site. Plus, I'm also a sucker for the cool use of the railroad modelling landscape bits. I always see the little model trees at A.C. Moore's or Hobby Lobby and want them so so so bad, especially the orange trees, but have no idea what I would actually make with them. On the subject of railroad modeling here's a video that I found and am shamelessly stealing from a Cracked article:
Beyond impressive for a medium, for lack of a better term, that has always been considered a kid's plaything. Apparently I am highly amused by miniature things, which I suppose is a benefit in jewelry making! As for more inspirational materials pertaining to my theme of Fun and Games (possibly just Games now) I haven't wandered across anything else yet, so it seems appropriate to cap this off with a quote from the Art Student Owl describing my current frustrations:
Its been two weeks into the semester, and a lot has been happening, even though I haven't been able to get into the studio as much as I want to (curse you swipe card)! and the quickest way to show off is through pictures so here we go!
Metalsmithing: worked up a couple pipe cleaner models for the nested vessel project. I am leaning toward the one on the left, and hope I can use 16 gauge blue aluminium wire to weave between the copper spokes of the base. It's going to take a hell of a lot of wire though and I'm not sure I have the patience or the funds. (Also I cannot get this paragraph to justify to the left for some reason, perhaps it needs to express its individuality?)
Jewelry: Making endless jump rings at home since the lock on the studio isn't active. I was able to get in one day though and start cutting out Pac-man links as well as learn how to fuse some jump rings! I'm only halfway regretting using absurdly thick metal for Pac-man, but at least the links will have more dimension to them?
Ceramics: Yep its a pinch pot with a snake looping around it. For this project I had to create a zoomorphic tripod vessel and this was the only good idea I could come up with. On the right is the slapped together maquette for the final. The final itself actually does stand on its own, though I do wish I could go back and re-seat the pinch pot at a more rakish angle but the piece is now dry and ready for crit on Tuesday.
CAD Class: In a move that I feel is somehow ironic, I'm the farthest ahead on things in my Rhino CAD class. Thus far we've been learning the interface and what tools do what by going through the basic tutorials. Hence the castle for moving and stacking solids, the flashlight for Boolean unions and differences (and an extra bit on lighting) and I got ahead on the duck, which is about manipulating the standard solid shapes into something more organic and a few other details. Now we are going to start an actual "real" project by building a toy. So far my only plan is to build a wind up toy, but it should be fun!
Something like this one though more complex than a sphere. Speaking of toys I've found some fun little quasi-inspirational things on the internet, which will be shared next time when I pretend this blog is on Tumblr.
Our first project for this class is to have a chain of some sort, with the clasp as the focal point. And as you may guess I'm basing this one on Pac-man. You may also be wondering then why I didn't title this post Pac-Mania or something similar, but we'll get to that in a moment. First some back story though.
Long time readers know I went to a CAD workshop last year hosted at the college, and came up with an abstract Pac-shape that I reeeeeeally wanted to use at the time but didn't quite have time to dwell on it. Now that I have mulled over it for a while my plan is thus:
I'll start by loosely riveting flat brass Pac-men eye to power pill. Since it will be a necklace I can't really paint the metal bright colors like I originally wanted, since the friction will likely wear it away. I may break up the monotony of the chain with blue Pente or Parcheesi pieces as a reference to to the color of the maze, ghosts, and as a more visible pellet.
The clasp however will be a big 3D Pac-man sitting on the back of the neck. Not only will it reference the transition in to three dimensional games in the late 90s/early 00s it will also represent the 256th level of the original arcade Pac-man from 1982. Wikipedia explains what happens on that level better than I can:
"Pac-Man was designed to have no ending – as long as the player keeps at least one life, he or she should be able to play the game indefinitely. However, a bug keeps this from happening: Normally, no more than seven fruit are displayed at the bottom of the screen at any one time. But when the internal level counter, which is stored in a single byte, reaches 255, the subroutine that draws the fruit erroneously "rolls over" this number to zero, causing it to try to draw 256 fruit instead of the usual seven. This corrupts the bottom of the screen and the entire right half of the maze with seemingly random symbols, making it impossible to eat enough dots to beat the level. Because this effectively ends the game, this "split-screen" level is often referred to as the "kill screen". Emulators and code analysis have revealed what would happen should this 255th level be cleared: The fruit and intermissions would restart at level 1 conditions, but the enemies would retain their higher speed and invulnerability to power pellets from the higher stages."
And this is what it looks like. Therefore my clasp will be an unrecognizable barely Pac-mannish shape, all glitched and distorted. Exactly how I'm not sure yet, but there's still a little bit of time to decide on that. All in all I'm actually looking forward to this project more than usual, goes to show what a good theme can do for generating ideas. For the immediate moment of this post there's no where to go except to drag up some relics from 1982 and the height of Pac-man (and arcade) fever starting of course with the Buckner & Garica song:
What better way to introduce the theme of Fun and Games than with a sweet video? This semester I've decided to look at games of all types; board games, card games, sports games, and video games. Despite my best efforts to look at the other categories my projects and posts will probably tend toward being about video games, as that's my main area of intrest and the one I know the most about. (incidentally if you're looking for an excellent book on the history of video games pick up Replay by Tristan Donovan, unless you're looking for highlights of acrade history then Supercade is your ballywick.)
I'm not alone in my fascination with video games and art, as there is an entire gallery dedicated to it called I am 8bit, in California. They also have a couple art books out which I have yet to look at. So this long story short, I am super excited to get started on this theme! Time to go round up some new theme appropriate music for my mp3 player!
