Pictish Stones

Like my teacup stonehenge I made this pictish stone model for Andy.
Polymer clay staked with toothpicks and brushed with acrylic glaze that I then wiped off.

Nails

I have a lot to do, but I like taking a little bit of time to do fun, silly things, so I am entering a blog contest. http://nailjuice.blogspot.com/2009/10/that-competition-i-was-talking-about.html

i am having my birthday.

Halloween Dragon Mask

Wheee! Fall is my favorite ever! The air, the trees, the birthdayCaitlan/birthdayDad/Dia De Los Muertes/Halloween/All Saints/birthdayAndrew/birthdayMom/guy fawkes (and elections!) is just this explosion of fun! It is my favorite part of the year I think. So I made this mask as part of my "St George and The Dragon" pair costume. I've got a red dress, a black lace vest, thigh high red socks with black threads, and knee high black boots. I was thinking to do all kinds of stuff for my costume, a little skirt with tattered ribbons and a small pair of wings made of thin fabric with fabric stiffener and wire, but i think it is a good costume the way it is already, it just came right together. Andy hasn't started his though, I said i'd do his halo and cape. That and a big red cross on a plain shirt will do him nicely if he doesn't find time to work on his costume.
The painting isn't done. It is almost done but a few things need stronger black (it rubbed off a bit while I worked) and possibly silver or white accents?
Oh yes, I have been much, much to busy to do my nails in more than a week, and I am hard on them. This is the inside of the mask. I plan to paint the foil red or just paint it anything really, since it looks unfinished. I used clay sparingly on the underside. Fimo is very light and this is thin, but I don't want to get a headache or have it fall off.

Electronics for Intermedia Project 1

The first project: a prototype or working component of our final project, a practical electrical arduino project. It was supposed to have working multiple LEDS and a potentiometer and a switch. Mine only has the LEDs. I know how to wire the pot and I know what a switch looks like. I was really close to learning how to do those: when the TA got to me after more than an hour he had time to sit and ask what I needed help with and then the professor called me up to discuss my proposal. My proposal for this!

After going thrifting 2 seperate times and finding nothing I was nervous I'd have to use my old art briefcase, which I am using to store stationary and it is brown and has a map painted on it, just really not right for this project and already used for something. But Andy's dad John had this excellent, excellent samsonite briefcase from we guess the 1980s. It is so perfect. It's so well made, and in great condition, and it's the right size for me to actually use.
Here is the excellent interior. The left compartment holds a casette! The right compartment is the same size as the cassette one, so andy said "It's for the casette you need immediate access to!" and we laughed because what is on a cassette? Why would some need strong plastic walls and others be adequately protected by a strap? Then we thought it might be a floppy disk. I am actually old enough to have used a floppy disk, but only have a fuzzy memory of it. The top has a snappy part and they are not floppy.

Anyway! The samsonite is fantastic but it was made indestructable! I need a lot of holes for my leds. My prof suggested using a hammer and nail, which made a tiny divot but didn't make a hole. (I bet someone could make a hole in a samsonite briefcase, but I was working with a little electronics for intermedia hammer and...) So, I went to the woodshop! Which I love! I tried to find an awl but had to use a tiny drill bit, a corer.
Wait, no, I had to make little dents* with a nail and hammer, and then I could drill. Indestructible.

So here is the setup. The pot meter is just chilling in the corner because I planned to connect it up but ran out of time.


Here are the hands free devices for soldering, dancing because they are so happy I got everything to work. The middle LED looked bright when I plugged them in one by one to check them, but next to the other ones it looks dull. At least it's symmetrical. There is a lot of solder, heat shrink tubing, and hotglue keeping that thing together (I plan to really use this as a briefcase from now on, and it's due in 7 weeks so it has to hold up) so getting out that LED... and then soldering inside a briefcase... and I won't be able to heat shrink anything because it might melt the hot glue...
Look, a "schematic". Yellow is ground, red is power, 225 resistors... It's only 15 soldered joins which I think would take only 45 minutes if everything went smoothly and you didn't need heat shrink plastic. The worst is when an LED cracked and I had to un heat shrink plastic everything around it. The stuff is really tough, and in the process I crimped a wire really a lot and had to replace it as I was afraid it would snap... I don't think I will use any heat shrink stuff for my main led part, too time consuming. Did you know LEDs can crack? Mine got too close to the heat gun I was using to shrink plastic.
So this is what the hot glue looks like on the inside. Hot glue is a mess but my prof suggested epoxy and I wanted it a lot more reversible in case anything breaks. It was really hard to do because there is no real way to look straight and up close at this part of the briefcase.
And here is what the hot glue looks like on the outside. I am very good with hot glue, actually, and made little frosted bubbles so the LEDs wouldn't be exposed (they're recessed, but the drilled holes are rough and everything, I thought smooth bumps would be better than rough indents both visually and practically).
So now I just need an RFID reader and tags set up by the next due date in 2 weeks. (If you don't do computer things, LEDS are to RFID as crawling is to dancing. It is quite a near deadline.)
*Well, I am saying nail to save face, but in the intermedia lab I couldn't find one so I used a small thing, like a straight screwdriver, and in the woodshop I was embarrassed to ask where the nails were so I used a screw. I felt a bit silly using a hammer to nail a screw into a briefcase, but it worked.

Acrylic Painting Week 3 Limited Palette

I was unprepared for class having missed 2 sessions for illness (Once to ill to go to a 3 hour studio and once too ill to drive 75 miles to santa cruz and then go to a 3 hour studio) so the professor asked me to do a painting from my sketchbook. When he cycled back to look at my initial sketch he seemed really disappointed with it so I gave up and just worked intuitively with the colors.
In person the field of gold has taupe, rose, and sap green smudges, and the black part has some burnt umber and crimson. It's the sort of thing that might work if it was 4 feet tall instead of 11 inches because it would be more immersive.
One of the sessions I missed was the contrasting hues+white painting from a model, so doing a "limited palette" painting using only one yellow, one blue, one red, one white, and one black, was quite hard. I looked around at breaks and most people were challenged I think, either doing a mostly flesh toned one or looking a bit like mine, though mostly they were turning out better.

This is where I got to when I decided it was getting more and more murky as I pushed the paint around and I should just stop. I tried to do yellow for neutral places, red for warm, and blue for shadow and cool tones. Then when that looked awful I painted over the yellow with titan buff/titanium white. I'm not entirely unhappy with this piece since I had to catch up from last week's session, but it is ugly to me. One problem was the murkiness (these acrylics take several days to dry) as the colors blended, and I could barely judge whether places were just dark, or dark and cool. :( . And next week's session is the day after my birthday so I won't be going... I'll be very behind. :( .

Acrylic Painting Week 3

The dainty bodies, formal dress, and elaborate detail of this old caricature appeal to me so I based a painting on it.
Here is what I finished in the first 3 hour studio session

And I worked on it a bit more after finishing (as best I could) my model portrait today.

Of course with the source it's based on and with my lack of experience painting figures it looks very stiff, I think it's all right but it's not really what I wanted.