Figurative Sculpture

This will be the end of the ceramics stuff. Above is a tank for insects that I left outside during the winter and it fell apart. I had wanted to put a little dead bug driving it but never got around to it.


I did this sculpture of Hannya from a Japanese ghost story 3 years ago. She is always depicted as mean and scary, but in the story she doesn't really do anything evil. She just seem sad, lonely, and persecuted.


I did this Puss Moth caterpillar in a workshop with the sculptor Beth Cavener-Stichter. It's solid clay, and about 300 times life size and now it lives in my basement.


I had an instructor tell me that surrealism is for people who don't know what they want to do. This is definitely the case here. I sculpted the face in a life drawing class, and I liked it too much too scrap it, so I made it into this beetle carapace. The wings broke so many times before I fired it, I don't know how those guys at the Franklin Mint do it.

Serving Vessels

I did a bunch of serving vessels along the same lines as the previous post, most of which are broken now.


This was a creamer and coffee jar set.
The top of this serving set was a bowl that could be flipped over.

Most of the previous work was wheel thrown, but the body of these mugs were slip cast from the filter of a Belgian gas mask.

Time for some more old stuff. I did a lot of ceramics when I first started college. One of the themes I focused on was robot armor for plants. If plants were going to make stuff, it would be made out of ceramics, right? See, it totally makes sense.

This last one was for the summer show at the Jake. It turned out to be too big and disassembled itself while on display.

Pod Jr.

This is really old, but I've never put it on the net before. In 2004 my friend Becky and I bought an electric golf cart as transportation for Burning Man. I had a short time and REALLY limited budget to make it into a Jetson's style spaceship. That's me.
Here's the initial concept sketch I sent in to get a permit to drive on the playa.
First I bought a 4'x8' sheet of styrene for the skirt. I built a frame around the cart out of wood bolted on to the fiberglass body. I tried to find something that wasn't garbage cans for the engines, but time was not on my side and garbage cans were what they had at home depot.
I went to every Goodwill in Eugene, which has the best Goodwill's anywhere, and bought them out of vacuum hoses. My face burns with shame when I think of how much of this thing was held together with zip-ties. I think I used two cases of Ace hardware grey primer, which is secretly Krylon but cheaper.
We put as much lighting on as we dared run off it's little 12 volt battery. My wife here did most of the electrical work.
Here it is more or less done. Jessica there did the swank upholstery. My paint job sucked, but it would be covered in playa dust so quickly it didn't really matter. I finished the edges with split conduit and zip-ties again.
Here we are scooting about the playa. It handled like a donkey with fetal alcohol syndrome, and had no suspension to speak of, but it beat walking a mile to the honey bucket.
Some blurry night time shots.

WOOD!

So here is some more old stuff. I took a furniture design course when I was in school and these are a few pieces I made for that. The first is a stool made from 2x4's.
Next I made this table out of a 4'x4' piece of birch plywood. I tried to use as much of the ply as I could, and ended up with less than 10% waste. The interior space is just the right size for my cat, but because I spent a lot of time on this he'll have nothing to do with it.
I had some extra bits so I made some cutting boards for family members. The board is hickory with a walnut handle. The inside corners on the handle were a bitch, and if I were to do any more I would just spend the time to make a router jig.

Taronga Leela's Wristlojackimator

My sister was Leela from Futurama for Halloween this year, and I promised that if she made the trip up to Seattle this year I would make her wrist kerjigger. I had been wanting to retool my vacu-forming machine for awhile, so it was a good opportunity to test it on something easy. I made a loaf shape by wrapping clay around my forearm. I have dainty forearms for a dude, so I knew it wouldn't be too big for my sister. Next I did a plaster negative, then positive. I wish I had photos of this part, but plaster stresses me out so I forgot. I vacuformed over the plaster and got two halves. I cut out the shape for the screen and used that bit to cut out the buttons, as they share the same curve.
Prime, sand, repeat.
Here it is painted, modeled by my wife, not my sister. I had the perfect seafoam green laying around. Ihave kind of way to much spraypaint laying around. I collect spraypaint like grandmas collect used tissues. I glued fabric inside for the hinge, then lined it with foam and velcro along the edge to clasp it shut. Here is my sister on Halloween thinking about science or something. She made the eye out of fabric that she sprayed with matte clearcoat.

Toshiba Satellite Casemod

I've been super busy with work and stuff lately, so I haven't had time to post or work on the space suit. I am going to post some older stuff from the last few years. The first is a case mod of my Toshiba Satellite A70 laptop, the biggest piece of crap ever. Sci-fi shows always have these overbuilt laptops. They look cool, but are bulky by today's standards. I had to tear this one apart repeatedly to keep it working, and it suffered a little more each time. I cracked the screen case the last time I repaired it, so I decided to give it that lived in futuristic feel. The very first step if you ever want it to work again is mask everything you don't want paint getting into. Then do it again.
I cut out some styrene cladding to cover the crack, and give it some useless detail. Next I sanded the hell out of it to get glue to adhere and paint to stick. Then I glued down the styrene using a solvent glue and weighted everything down so it would stick evenly.
Now it gets a coat of primer to fill gaps and pitting that the sanding missed, and to ensure the paint will coat well.
Now it gets an undercoat of metallic paint. I used Rustoleum "anodized bronze". It's nice and dark and looks like real metal. I usually use krylon over Rustoleum because it dries faster and runs less, but they don't make a good metallic paint. It looked so good like this I almost left it, but I bought a faux rust kit and wanted to try it out.
Now for the fake rust to make it look like it gets used for downloading Jawa porn. On this project I used sponges like the package suggested. This is fine if you are Martha Stewart antiquing a credenza, but it looked unconvincing. I did a Czerka rifle for a tusken raider Halloween costume and found that spraying straight from the can looks alot better in the end. If I did this over again I probably would have left it bronze or maybe white.