Not For Dad (do not look at it it is a surprise)

Go away Daddy, it is the SOMETHING I made for you and you will like to see it in person. We had a project in art, to make a gift and mail it, and I picked Dad. But I don't think I will mail it because I am going home after next week and it is sort of fragile.

Making things from paper is nice because it is a good balance of testing and planning, and creativity. This was meant to look steampunk, and I think the colors convey that really well but maybe not the shape. The temptation with paper is to make everything really streamlined and sort of modular looking. When I presented this in class someone said it looks like the jetsons. I think up close the "rivets" (I used my compass point to emboss the back of some of the paper) and the red wallpapery rocketskin make it look a little steampunk. I even think the overall body shape does. But yeah, the little antennae nosecone is not very victorian, and the fins should be a totally, totally different shape- maybe more spindly? Another thing is that I ignored the functional enginey parts (one guess why) which are usually the focus in steampunk. I am really happy with how it turned out though, and I am glad I have drafted a pattern so I can make more.


this is the rocket posed on a painting I am working on. I bought a hake brush to do the blending and cover big areas quickly, and it works really well. Eventually I am going to paint on dinosaur bones but first I have to get better at bones. The painting is going to be called Nightmare Room, because it is based on my invention, the Nightmare Room.*

And here landed on the beanbag chair. The neat thing about self contained things like a model submarine or model cottage is that they transcend being models and look like a little object in the world, they force their surroundings to become part of the image or the work.

Here is a close up, again on the painting. Wow, almost any fin shape would have been better than that.

*The Nightmare Room came into my mind when someone pointed out that dinosaurs aren't scary because they are just skeletons- to me that beautifully conflates two really, really scary things. So basically in the nightmare room you are trapped in a room or a big cave or a coliseum, and it is very very dark. And you haven't got anything with you, not a flashlight or a candy bar. And you see a little far off light, and you are like, yay! A light! I will go to it- and it undulates toward you and when it is like a half mile away you see that it is a mosasaur and so you try to run away. When it eats you your skeleton stays in the coliseum and your flesh goes to the Cretaceous (it is maybe a different era, I don't feel like checking) in the stomach of the alive mosasaur.