Polygons in the Rough

Okay so I haven't gotten that far in making my Moldy Vote pin, so let's talk about the digital methods class I'm taking for a moment instead.

Bam, a sort of southwesty looking hut.

Bam, the back of the ratty hut with a giant mouse jumping off the roof.

Bam, a swank interior with the chairs.

Here's one separate for your perusal (Bam!).

Bam, the barely passable animation. Notice anything different from the images?

Either my knowledge of Sketchup is embaressingly small or its got a few quirks since you may have noticed that the background color is different in the animation than it is in most of the still images. That is because even though the program is smart enough to apply the changes you make to the 3D model to all your "frames" of animation it can't handle changing the background color too. Here I am against a deadline so the animation remains as I had it.

Here is how far I have gotten on the Moldy Vote pin by the way. I have the back plate roughed out and currently doing a test threading of the front with the check mark. the next steps are to drill two more thread holes, solder the halves together, solder the pin back on, and then add the patriotic ribbon among whatever other steps I forgot.

For other random news I found out by never having switched my homepage off of MSN, apparently Russia just revealed they have a huge stash of industrial diamonds. Supposedly it's enough high quality industrial diamonds to supply the world for 3,000 years. I'm a wee bit skeptical about the claims, but if havoc is wreaked on the price of the shiny pieces of carbon soon we'll know why.

 

Today's sound interlude is brought to us by the Olsen Gang's 1976 movie The Olsen Gang Sees Red, particulary the most famous scene in which the comedic criminal gang breaks into a theater in time to the opera music playing. Do enjoy, and brush up on your Danish too!

Dot, Dot, Dot, Dash, Dash, Dash, Dot, Dot, Dot

Having no ideas for my five pins of doom I thought I might try looking at old space probes, since looking at images of Jupiter helped me so much in making a pendant for mold making.

Silly me forgot that scientific instruments aren't exactly made for looks nor are all that wonderful to pull design elements from as evidenced by Venera-9 up there, but at least I found this guy's website again, and his excellent write ups and images on the Soviet Venus missions, with bits on their Moon probes  and Mars erm, attempts. The net result of this is that I changed my computer background to an old Viking Mars image,

and have a dim sketch of a pin based almost entirely on my memory of what the Voyager probes looked like.

After indulging my interests in all matters space related, I tripped back through my sketch book to bring out some old designs: particularly this movable gear pin,

as well as rotating my see-saw earring on to its side for this pin.

From here I went into my inspirational art image folder on my computer (because every designer has one of those) and found a comic strip with lions in it as part of the joke where I really, really liked the way their eyes were drawn so I attempted to do an acrylic inlay of it.

This in turn has made me go find a way to remedy my lack of a belt sander situation, as trying to fit the green plastic into the black ended in snapping, words, and a lot of gluing.

Thus far I am most happy with this switchblade heart as I'm calling it, it being the first try at messing around with the hydraulic die formed shapes I've had for weeks. You can tell I can't decide if the front or back looks better, but damn does it look spiffy with the malachite cabochon sitting on it.

If you're really paying atttention to this post you've noted that there are only four pins of doom reperesented here. Sadly I'm back to ramming my head against the wall for the fifth design and trying to work hydraulic die shapes into to it. Once I make the last pin though I'll either edit this post or make a new one (depending on how grand a piece of jewelry it is). Until then I'll just put a non-sequitur conclusion here with one of the trippy animations of the 1960s, The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics directed by Chuck Jones for MGM in 1965. Most of my work is geometric anyways so it fits, I guess?