A loooong time coming, back on track, plans man, plans!

Anyway, I finished the display set a while ago but never got around to uploading the pics. I have moved and everything! Here we go!

So I began by giving the panels a couple coats of a nice dark grey. This made the panels bow a little which I had hoped to avoid by using nice thick foamcore so I pressed them flat again under a bunch of books.

I drybrushed it lightly with a slightly lighter shade of the same grey to bring out the texture and make the panel lines stand out.

I then used a few lighter shades to make a few panels stand out.

The three panels glued together and WALLA! WALLS!

And now I have a nice little setting to photograph toys and models in that adds visual interest without dominating.

The toy in question is an Armodoc from Onell Designs. Which is also where I got the idea for the set in the first place. Give it a look, the man makes amazing toys.

I would like to make a few of these and make them a bit more intricate, but in the future I think I will use acrylic rather than foamcore. Foamcore is a wonderful quick and dirty material, but it’s fragile and even more prone to warping than I remembered. Perhaps a base piece of acrylic with the interior shapes made of foamcore or some other easier material to cut.

Next up… new stuff!

After puttering around the hotel for most of the morning we went and hunted for breakfast… Which we utterly failed to find at 10:00am

Apparently on the whole Japan Center doesn’t wake up at all until 11:00 or 11:30

So we made our sleepy way home where I blearily tagged the bagged robots.

I’ll post here when I put these bad boys up for sale, I know you can’t wait to get one of your very own!

I then started hacking into some foamcore I have had lying around forever.

This was nice lazy mindless work and there’s a great deal of it to do so it carried me nicely into Monday.

The idea here is to make sci-fi-ish scenery for photographing and displaying toys in. This is a bit of an ongoing project and It will get it’s own post when I’m a little further along.

I also made a quick prototype doll part for one of Nadjas dolls using a pitifully weak magnet and epoxy putty.

It hold on ok at best and the clearcoat I used milked up something fierce, but it looks cool enough that I’m going to make a better version (and other parts) soon.

And that brings us to the end of my week of making stuffs!

I could probably have fit a lot more projects in but I’m pleased with what I did and I had a blast! I started a few projects that will come to fruition in the weeks to come and I think I have reminded myself that I really like making things and that I should do it more often!

Stay tuned here to see what I make… and maybe see me wear a hat!

I spent the morning finishing the cardboard project I was working on Thursday night. This is a sort of proof of concept prototype for a later project, just to prove to myself that it’s a good idea, I think it probably is.

He turned out about 5 times taller than I was going for but he’s as poseable as I hoped.

More on this guy another time.

Then Nadja led me on a merry chase of train, boat, and bus to Japan Center in San Francisco where she had gotten a room at the Kabuki Hotel. One of our favorite things to do is to hang out in hotels and watch all the TV we never usually get, so this is very awesome!

While watching something about food or makeup or something I finished the Robot? cards.

I think these are now officially multimedia in the older meaning of that word… spraypaint, rollerball, and sharpie! I have officially put a silly amount of effort into this project, and I have no idea if it is interesting to anyone but me! I guess time will tell.

I say “almost” two points because actually moving the arms is going to cause a certain amount of paint loss.

I say “probably” because seriousy, it seems likely!

Now… more TV… mmmmmm TV

Hot… very hot!

The early day went rather well. My beloved immediately destroyed my whole not having caffeine thing by making coffee. That helped a lot and I am eternally grateful!

I began by finishing the Gwinn figure for the www.octobertoys.com forum Gwinn exchange. I gave him a nice black base coat and then applied an even drybrush of gunmetal paint to give him a sparkly shine that pictures don’t quite capture. I’ll try to get some more careful shots before I have to ship him out.

I gave his visor two coats of white to get a good even base, then three coats of glow in the dark paint, followed by a reddish ink, then another coat of glow in the dark… hopefully the effect will work well enough.

I had drilled four holes into the back of the body gwinn and one into each limb gwin and added some scrap wire I had cut to size.

And then gave him a nice shiny coat to protect everything. I’m quite happy with the wah he turned out. It’s not really obvious he’s made mostly of penguins.

And how often can you say that?

Then I took a bunch of the cards I cut and made some stencils and started laying down spray paint for the crappy toy robots which after a night of drying had been bagged.

I cut a rough stencil out of the card I had been doodling the designs onto then transferred it to a piece of manilla folder. Plastic would have been more ideal, but for 20 cards the cardstock is fine.

The first pass was a red starburst pattern for the front and back of the card. It came out pretty much exactly as I had hoped though, note to self: wear a glove if you are going to be spraypainting more or less directly on to your hand!

The second pass was the title of these pieces in blue. The process is a bit messy and spreads wonderfully but these are more a backdrop for the ink lettering later so they can afford to be less than fully legible.

It actually is already pretty readable…

I folded and punched a hole in each and packed them up to take with me wherever I will be Friday, Saturday, and a bit of Sunday… which is still unknown to me. The current theory of underwater mountain dogsledding has not yet been discounted.

At this point the heat turned up and I turned way down! I spent the rest of the day parked in front of my computer playing games and fiddling with cardboard and glue. That particular project isn’t quite done so will be talked about later…

If there is a later!

I have a bunch of pens, cardboard, index cards, and some tools to come with me wherever I am going, and I am told there will be internet. so I hope to update each day (or the following morning as has been happening) with whatever it is I am doing, but if nobody hears from me by Monday… you will know why, and if I’m still missing after that… call Interpol!

So I got less done today than I would have liked… I spent a very large part of the day on something that ended up very subtle and wasn’t in a huge rush to make up the difference… I think the fact that I seem to be giving up caffeine at the same time as doing this for part of the sluggishness… I hadn’t planned to do that but after a couple of days without I might as well go for it. Quitting caffeine is something I do every year or two, and while it never sticks long there is usually a burst of manic energy that accompanies my body working out how to run on it’s own energy again so there’s that to look forward to.

So… I finished the crappy toy robots. I still need to make the tags for them but I’ll do that Friday and Saturday when I will be doing whatever mystery thing I am doing and I am told that I can do some sort of portable craft. I’ll do the spraypainting part of it early Friday and then the penwork… whenever I can?

Anyway, I gave each painted part a wash of thinned down black paint and a wipe with a rag to sort of add definition to all the various details…

This had to be done 120 times and took forever… the end results were almost subtle enough that had I known I probably wouldn’t have bothered.

That’s one of the better examples…

Then I started putting them together.

I tried to switch up body and arm styles and colors so that no two would be the same, I think they look kind of spectacular, an homage to the cheap plastics and shoddy workmanship that, oddly enough, is the hallmark of the toys they started as… If it’s as self referential as that it HAS to be art! Right?

Then I paired up accessories to make sure each one would be as garish as possible.

Behold! A veritable army of crapulence!

Trust me, bagged and carded these are going to look awesome

I did some of the design work for the cards but don’t have much to show for that until I actually start making them.

Also in toy news… I worked on a toy for a custom trade being done over at http://www.octobertoys.com

The Deadline is tomorrow and I left this to the very last moment so I need to get a heck of a move on. I think it’s going to turn out pretty darned well… we will see on Thursday.

The toy in question is their Gwinn, a little vinyl penguin. The idea is that a bunch of people each take a blank (unpainted) version of the toy and make one custom. Names are drawn and then everyone sends their work to another person and everyone gets a unique piece.

They also make little tiny miniature versions.

When I saw them an idea came flooding into my head and i had to join the trade. Honestly I don’t even care what I might get, I just needed the excuse to make this little guy…

Painting and some small detailing to be done Thursday.

You may be wondering why Monday’s post is going up late Tuesday… well it’s because Monday evening and most of the day Tuesday were basically a wash.

I do this internet radio show every week and we often have some drinks while doing it… Monday Night we had all the drinks in the world. I do not advise doing this, and it’s something I plan to avoid doing again any time soon… ow

If you are interested the show can be heard here: http://beep.podbean.com/ I recommend also listening to other past episodes that are a little less of a trainwreck than this particular show.

Anyway Monday!

I got up a little later than I had hoped because I didn’t actually get to bed until 2 on Sunday. I found a couple of useful supplies in our buildings ‘free pile’ and four really heavy duty 12 volt batteries. If they hold a charge they will be perfect for a project I have planned for probably early next year.

Then I headed out to MakersField ( http://visitmakersfield.com/ ) which needs some love badly. I cleaned up a little and poked around at what I had there. I selected a couple things I would want to bring back with me then proceeded to cut cardstock for three projects I’ll do this week.

On the way home I picked up a couple pieces of hardware for a sort of frankenbag I am going to make and grabbed a bunch of dollar store toy Gundam bootlegs as seen here…

They are the latest technology!

My favorite thing about these is the warning…

Just what one wants in a toy right? And what toy standard would find this allowable?

So I tore them apart, washed them in some TSP then with soapy water and set them out to dry.

Then I spray-painted all the arms and accessories, sadly two of the colors ran out doing this so they will be even more mismatched than originally intended, ah well that’s ok, kind of what I am going for.

More on this on Tuesday.

I also worked more on some audio tracks that I’ll probably finish Wednesday. Not using the Theremin yet… I don’t understand it well enough to get much done. I’ll post some audio or video or something in the near future though.

Then I prepped for the aforementioned show culminating in the embarrassing end to the day.

See you tomorrow (today)!

So I slept in a satisfying amount and hopefully have that out of my system for the week, from here on in it’s in bed by 1 and up by 6 (hopefully)!

puttered about all morning, gathered some supplies together, cleaned up a tiny bit, took stock of a few projects then I got down to it… more being a bit lazy and not doing all that much.

I did do some audio work, I’ll finish those tomorrow and post them here, I also finished this…

I am now the proud owner of a fully functional Moog Etherwave theremin manufactured by Big Briar.

It’s kind of embarrassing how little work this was when I got down to it. Most of the kit was completed.

All I really had to do was fix the stripped out mount for the pitch wand, reverse the mounts for the volume wand (they were originally put in backwards) and solder a wire twixt wands and board…

And Walla!

$360 worth of screeching electronics absolutely free to me.

Now to learn how to tune and play it…

So it’s been a really really oppressively hot day… I helped my darling Nadja knock the back out of our closet so she can build a magical doll wonderland and I tweaked this site up a bit… still not entirely pleased there but it will do for now.

Also I went through some boxes and found some materials for this weeks projects… up next, repair a theremin. It needs a little TLC, one wand is attached to the board with a paperclip and the other isn’t at all… that has to change… also the pitch wand’s mounting hole is completely stripped out so I will have to get clever with epoxy or something and get that stable. I also plan to do some Audio weirdness on Sunday so that will be fun.

The evening was taken up with a birthday Ethiopian food dinner and Tiki Bar expedition… poor me…

WHEEEE

Ok, so no burning man for me this year, I’m ok with that. But I had the time off all approved and stuff and BOY HOWDY did I need a break!

So I have decided and declared this to be a week where I make a whole lot of things.

I’ll update every night this week with what I am working on and where it is. This Saturday and Sunday will be somewhat light as I am recovering from a heck of a couple of weeks at work and want to sort of ease in a little. Next Friday and Saturday… I have absolutely NO IDEA where I will be or what I will be doing. It’s a surprise, I know I will be elsewhere and have been told I can bring small portable projects. I don’t know if there will be a network for me to connect to or not, for all I know I will be spending two days in a pit full of spiders, or clowns, or spiderclowns, ew!

So first project… oh, it was getting this blog up and running! I did that