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?

Get A Move On

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...

256 Levels of Zen

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:

The board game version:

and the intro to the cartoon:

Not to mention all the other merchandising...