A wee bit devilish

Here's last year's pumpkin:

Here's last year's pumpkin with a candle in it :-)

It's supposed to be a little imp hiding behind a leaf in the underbrush. The hardest part, but most satisfying in the end, was shaving down the leaf to a minimal width that would allow a fair amount of light through and show the silhouette of the imp behind it.
This was largely carved by dremel although the big spaces were taken out with a knife. I cut too close on the tail and the ears and ended up clipping them off, but it was easy enough to reattach them with little pieces of toothpick. On Halloween night, some drunk asshole put his knee through it--an unfortunate fate, but this sort of art is always ephemeral anyhow.

Pirates on the Panama Canal

This pirate costume was cobbled together for a pirate-themed birthday/going away party my last night at the BCI field station a couple summers ago. Not a Halloween costume, but a costume nonetheless. Though everyone was doing intensive field work, parties were not uncommon (3-4 during the 6 weeks I was there). From the box of party knick-knacks available in the study lounge I found a belt to cinch one of my field shirts with and a floppy hat that I pinned up to make a tricorn. The cravat and sleeve ruffles were made with paper towels and masking tape, and everyone's eyepatch was sharpied notebook paper except for Dana who sported a piece of driftwood (3rd from left above). Lastly, I borrowed a razor from another student to make a more roguish shape of the facial hair I'd been growing out all trip. Quite dashing, no?

--"You asked me to draw you a tattoo of Poseidon. You never specified I couldn't draw him with a monster dong. . . 


. . .yeah, that's sharpie."

October

Time for a batch of Halloweeny posts (i.e. pumpkins and costumes)! True, it's been October for almost 2 weeks, but I've been out canyoneering in SW Utah. I'll start off with my costume from last year: the Egyptian deity Horus.

I started with a clay mask that I sculpted directly on my face because I had nothing else to lay it on to keep its shape. I packed tin foil onto my face and began laying on slabs of clay. After I had the right form, I found that it would stand up if placed over two upside-down kitchen bowls--one big (forehead), one small (chin). From there, I finished the details: semi-circle cuts for a feathered look, nostrils, shaping the eyes, etc.

-Here's the mask in the oven:

Then, as with anything else I make with super sculpey, I painted it with acrylics and sprayed it with a finish/fixant. The colors are based off of the peregrine falcon, with a few creative liberties to accommodate for a human contour.

-Profile:                                                                  -3/4 angle:

The rest of the costume was essentially a black leotard with a white Egyptian-style loincloth and an ochre cloth head-dress. Unfortunately, only one picture of me fully dressed exists, and I don't currently have it. As soon as I get it I'll update this post.

Now to start brainstorming for this years costume!

Treebeard

Sorry to have skipped a Music Monday; there will be some good stuff coming up but I've been swamped for the time being. For now I'll leave you with a picture from 2009's Guatemala expedition:

Druids rule!                                                              Photo credit: Steve Bylsma

Veggie corks

Last year I spent a week up at UALR's research cabin on the Buffalo River with my lab mate and good friend Dr. Robin Verble. She often commented on the row of glass bottles with vegetable-themed corks that stood perched upon the fridge; it usually entailed a desire to steal them. Thus, when she got married several months later I decided to give her the next best thing: home made reproductions.

They were a ton of fun to make although I don't think I got all of the vegetables right. There was an eggplant instead of the asparagus, and some other thing in place of the corncob. One particular thing I loved was how the best way to make most of these was to combine small sculpted components rather than molding the whole vegetable from a solid piece of clay; I felt it really spoke to the composite nature of plants.

Each of these goes with a square glass bottle about 2 inches tall.

Pelican beach (the one in my head)

This is an image salvaged from the chaff of fading dreams; that point when you're about to wake up and the oneiric weirdness comes flying thick and fast. I was standing on a beach watching this pelican serve bill-pouch-soup to a line of chameleons who changed their levels of transparency rather than their hue:

I have yet to be able to capture the method of transportation by which I arrived at this scene: inside the 6-seater rib cage of a 12-foot skeletal horse. It's a lot harder to draw.

Music Monday - Take IX

Saloon Music:


The first section is just riffing on a G-minor 12 bar blues. In the later half I was going for more of a ragtime feel, using some chord progressions from "Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear." The first time I played these in front of anybody my uncle said that I belonged in a saloon, so that kinda stuck. Play this track whenever you feel the urge to smash a sugar-glass bottle or a balsa wood chair over someone's head.

Research themed tats FTW!

This is a draft of a sleeve design commissioned by one of the faculty from my M.S. program, Dr. Matt Gifford. He had seen a tattoo design I drew for my roommate Jonathan and asked for a drawing that he could comment on, direct, and then bring to a tattoo artist. The (obviously not-to-scale) salamander is one of his study organisms, Plethodon jordani, and the tree is a hemlock with his daughter's name carved into it.

He really liked the design, but I have yet to hear if he's followed through and gotten it. My favorite part was seeing how excited his wife was with the idea of him getting a bicep half-sleeve: actually 100% super-stoked.

Siege weapons

A functional Lego trebuchet from Highschool:

It's outfitted with an adjustable pin that allows for fine tuning of the trajectory. What's really cool is that it will actually fire farther on wheels than if it's laid flush on the ground. It's got something to do with energy being lost in the backlash. Due to scaled proportions, and the low density of Legos, I supplemented the counterweight with downward pulling rubberbands. Cheating? Maybe, but I can still hit your turd of a castle from across the entire living room.

Music Monday - Take VIII

Piano Fragments: TPS-006

The dynamics in this particular recording aren't how I usually want them to be, but I'm finding that I often tense up while recording and I'm pleased to get takes without too many mistakes. I know I should try to be more patient, and I can record as many takes as necessary to get the perfect one, but as soon as I hit the record button I make ten times more errors than when I'm playing normally. I wish someone would come and record me in secret; despite how creepy that would actually be, it might yield great takes.

On the subject of recording, I'm using a really quick setup using nothing but keyboard --> 1/4in cable --> 1/8in adapter --> computer, and though the scope of what I can tweak is more limited this way, it means I'm much more likely to record on a daily basis so my output will be higher. Unfortunately, it does produce a lot of pops at random times, but they go away temporarily when I restart the software, so I don't think it's a cable problem.

For those of you who don't care a lick about the recording process, just listen to the piece. It's got a nice sweeping intensity to it. I hope that makes sense.

Cop-out

I'm slowly running out of material again, and school is picking up so I may be a little less fastidious about posting in the weeks to come. I'll try to keep spans between posts under two years. In the mean time, here's a thing:

Music Monday - Take VII

Piano excerpt: TPS-003

Another piano composition, this one written over the course of 2008-2009. A lot of what I write comes in scraps which later get refined and sometimes fused. What's recorded here is actually an excerpt of a long string of melodies that I've been stitched together with odd transitions--hence why it clips in and sounds like it's been cut short. The omitted portions have been scrapped and may be used for other works.

The mood starts off forlorn but shifts into something a bit more soothing. I always imagine rain when I play it: it's often associated with melancholy but can be very comforting at times.

The title comes from having worked on ant taxonomy all day. That's usually how temporary morphospecies are labeled.

Skulls: 3/4 angle

Not 100% anatomically proportioned, but a fun shape to reproduce none the less.
-A pencil drawing                                   -A paper puzzle

Ork Boyz

To those of you who are not familiar with Warhammer or Warhammer 40k, they are a series of tabletop strategy games where participants collect, assemble, and paint massive amounts of figurines which they then pit against each other at the whim of fist-fulls of six-sided dice. I got into it in high school, but it can be a severely expensive hobby and finding the right people to play with can sometimes be a challenge. One of my favorite aspects was that even though any model you put on the table had distinct rules for the unit it represented, you could have the model look like anything you wanted by putting together stock pieces in creative ways and adding bits of card, metal and clay. The process of deviating from what the standard packaged model is supposed to look like is called conversion, and some people take it to an extreme.

All that being said, I took some extra space-orks that I had and made this display of an ork metal band. "Waaaaagh" is what orks say. . . always. . . and constantly. Senior year of high-school I brought it to my local gaming store where it still resides in a glass case alongside some far worthier local artist conversions.

Their music probably sounds like this:

Each ork is about an inch tall. All of their equipment is made of bits of weapons and tank pieces, and the drummer has a line of enemy helmets like that ewok in ROTJ.

Music Monday - Take VI

Fuck, it's Wednesday


I wrote this one last fall (2011) whilst hungover the morning after a craw-fish boil. Half of the lyrics came unbidden within the first hour of waking and I scrambled to get them down in a notebook as I groped around my kitchen for hashbrowns. I fleshed out the missing verses over the course of that day, and by the next day I had found all of the chords that matched the melody I'd been forming. By April I started playing it comfortably on the concertina, and in June I got around to recording it with Keith Bracy (whom I mentioned two weeks ago). He's still working on the EQ, so I apologize for the still-perceptible lack of a pop screen.

Here are the lyrics:

___________________________

Have you ever awoken from nothing--
Not a dream, nor the memory of going to bed?
You pounded your drink, but the moment you blinked,
the toilet was supporting your head.

How often do you wake up from nothing?
A dumbfounding, liquor-inspired blank slate.
Sprawled out you stall, as you begrudgingly recall
the life's worth of bullshit you tried to escape.

God, I hate waking from nothing.
The sting of reality's the worst kind of pain.
My body's intact, but I need to extract
the brick that's in place of my brain.

Have you ever awoken to no one?
We all have at some point in our lonely lives,
but the longer you wait, you'll seal your fate--
it's hard to get lucky when you're 65.

How often do you wake up to no one?
The vacant spot next to you hurts now and then,
but the deep-seated yearning can be quashed by returning
to the bars to forget once again.

Good God, I hate waking to no one.
No one has pity or ears they can lend.
My houseplants are great, but they won't get me laid.
This bottle of Tanqueray's my only friend.

Last night will remain an enigma.
There's no note or a single reminder in sight;
just this flippant erection, and no recollection
of events that transpired last night.

But you're here asleep right beside me;
Your eyelids are fluttering; you're wrinkling your nose.
It's warming my heart, but it gave me a start
when I woke to discover I was wearing your clothes.

But I'd rather wake up from nothing
than to ever wake up to no one.
If my liver is shot and my mind's been erased
at least I woke up to your face.

'Cause, I'd rather wake up from nothing
than to ever wake up to no one.
You're my saving grace, I hope you feel the same.
So tell me babe: what is your name?

Antigua

This is a sketch of the ruined façade of the El Carmen church in Antigua, Guatemala. Antigua was once the capitol city, but it lies in the valley below three volcanoes and has been subject to multiple earthquakes and volcanic mudflows that have required the city to be rebuilt on several occasions.

I apologize for the glare. The paper I drew it on was worn incredibly thin due to months of travel and I didn't want to risk taking it out of the frame where it now resides.

Here's a photo of the church:

Raccoon

Raton Laveur

Quelle pauvre bête, car la vie qu'il a choisi,

reste couincé dans les gouttières et les déchets moisis.

Ce bandit, si maudit,

qui doit voler sans un bruit.

Est-ce qu'il a vraiment choisi ce malheur:

de sortir dans les ténèbres et l'absence de chaleur?

A-t-il demandé de vivre

dans sa fourrure sans valeur?

Oui, bien sûr. Car quelle exsitence pourra

lui offrir autant que cette libèrté lui donnera?

Quand il sera connu partout en notoriété,

mais en solitude il vivra.

TRANSLATION:

Raccoon

What a poor beast, for the life he has chosen

remains stuck in the gutters and molding waste.

This bandit, so cursed

Who must steal without a sound.

Did he really choose this misfortune:

to emerge in the darkness and the absence of warmth?

Did he ask to live

in his worthless fur?

Yes, of course. For what existence could

grant him as much as that freedom could give?

When he will be known everywhere in notoriety,

but live in solitude.

________________________________________

French conjugation can make rhyming really hard >_< This ran through 6 drafts before it started making grammatical sense, but now I'm quite proud of it and it's a ton of fun to read aloud.

Music Monday - Take V

Steph


This is one of my first compositions on the piano. Like any beginner I started in C major, and the rest developed by ear when I realized I liked the sound of a fifth played with the third and octave above (That's the lower notes you're hearing from the left hand). I didn't know what that meant as I didn't know as much theory then, but it was something neat I could do while making use of the 10 note span my hands can cover. Some of the chords are dissonant and some of the rhythms feel a little off-kilter, but I was experimenting as all I ever really played before this was the 1-4-1-4-5-4-1 of a twelve bar blues.

For the time being this is the best recording I have although the EQ could stand some tweaking.

School:

. . . the ideal place to hide from the real world.
Today marks the end of the first week of grad school at the University of Utah. So, to commemorate the occasion with a blend of art and scientific education, here are some of the chalkboard drawings I did for the zoology lab I taught during my M.S.

They're in no particular order

More ants

To anybody seeing these posts that doesn't really know me, I study ants. I find them inspiring marvels of evolutionary innovation and they tend to have an impact on my artistic endeavors, hence many an ant post.

Today - Ant sculptures given to the members of the Ward lab at UCDavis when I volunteered there:

Click the genus names to see images of the actual ants they're based on.

Crematogaster

Eurhopalothrix

Mayriella

As with any sculpture involving many intricate appendages, the creation of these ants involved making all of the legs, stings, mandibles, antennae, and even spatulate hairs ahead of time. These were then all baked so that they would retain their shape when inserted into the main body. The legs in particular had wire running through the middle terminating with an exposed hook to ensure they would stay attached (baked clay doesn't bond very well with unbaked clay). Each head and main body segment had balled up tinfoil as a core to conserve clay and make the sculpture lighter. I do that with pretty much everything.

I also tried to make an Amblyopone almost twice the size of these while in Panama, but the humidity made the clay flaky and the the smaller parts got burnt and brittle especially due to being baked twice.

Music Monday - Take IV

The Old Box Under the Stair:


This is a scrap of a song that I wrote a couple of months ago and had the wonderful opportunity to record with the aid of Keith Bracy, a drummer of outstanding talent. He has a jazz background but plays in a number of southern-metal bands in North Little Rock, and has a penchant for recording, mixing, and producing as well. His curiosity for my concertina led me to laying down tracks of anything I could play and this song ended up emerging in a fashion I'd never played before but really liked the sound of. The working title was "Cock Mongrel" thanks to my friend Jonathan, but I feel like that didn't really suit the mood of it.
I like to imagine something like this playing as someone is exploring an old abandoned house and stumbles across an ancient box with something devastating inside.

I'd like to expand upon it, ideally laying down some drums, and strings/electric guitar where it picks up towards the end.

The Golden Snitch

Behold!

I made this snitch  in 2007 as a gift for a friend before you could just buy one at the store. I placed it in a box that I covered in paper and ink to make it look a tad more regal. On one side there are swirling engravings and on the other side is a very poorly translated inscription reading "We'll lead as two kings" in Latin, although it more than likely says something like "Us reigning as how king twins."

The snitch was made with oven bake clay packed around a wooden core, and metallic origami paper over jeweler's wire for the wings. I carved a small compartment inside the wooden core to house secret messages, jewels, drugs, teeth, monkey tears, demon souls, etc. The etchings in the surface were made after a pre-bake (a half cook time to stiffen the clay without fully setting it) in order to avoid warping on the surface. Pre-bakes are great if you ever need to carve a design into a sculpture or you want to make straight cuts that will hold their shape, particularly if you're going for a hewn stone look. The swirling lines and the inscription we stained with a brown ink wash: coating the piece in watered-down ink/paint that seeps into recesses and then wiping off the excess on the surface.

It doesn't fly, but it looks pretty sweet.

Lamp

Music Monday - Take III

House of Jeffrey - lyrics at end of post

This song was written on a front lawn one lazy Saturday, when Remy decided he wanted to write something with a slide guitar part. I hummed along a melody and slowly started patching words in, inspired and saddened by the fact that I would soon be leaving Davis and all my friends behind to start school someplace else. We came up with the idea of writing about a tree-house because it embodies childhood nostalgia.

The next day we set about recording the song, and rushed around the house "exploring" for sounds to compliment the whimsical mood of the song.  Everything you hear (aside from guitar and vocals) were made by the following:
-A guitar pedal
-A wine glass
-A parasol
-A cymbol
-A ruler
-A cellphone
-Wind chimes
-10 overlapping tracks of us yelling like pirates
Remy made a much better pirate than I did; I sounded more like an orc.
The song remains my favorite track from that particular collaboration. It stands as a monument to my best college years and very fond memories. I hope it invokes something similar in others who hear it too.

_________________________________________

Here are the lyrics:

I went home last summer
to get my roots back in the ground,
and I was back at the old tree house
with no one else around.
And I found myself thinking
of all the things it once had been:
spaceships and time-machines,
and Big Jeffrey looking in.
He was a mean old kingfisher
with a beak of plated gold,
and he'd sit upon the bow
as we'd let the day unfold.

Time-travel?
Not a problem.
Dinosaurs?
Yeah, we rode on one or two,
and the passers-by all swam in lava
though they never had a clue.
Yeah, we rode on for hours
'till the dinner bell was rung,
and we'd hitch our pterodactyls
and wash up for some grub.

Though seasons have changed and winters come along,
the memories remain and keep it standing strong.
The bones that we've broken and trouble that we've made
just help us to find the dreams we have today.

Aliens?
Green and slimy.
Flying saucers?
We flew them at light speed.
We'd drag race any comet
and explore the galaxy.
Pirates?
Fought 'em often
Treasure?
We dug up our fair share.
We made our sisters walk the plank
and hung their dolls up by their hair.
We'd sail on for hours
'till the wind blew out our lights,
and Jeffrey would sing us to sleep
it's how he liked to say goodnight.

Though seasons have changed and winters come along,
the memories remain and keep it standing strong.
The cannons have rusted. The crew has gone away,
but adventure lives on in the things we do today.

Remy became a river boat captain along the river Styx.
I work in a bar on Mars where I sing and do magic tricks.
We may not really be in the places that we claim,
but life looks a little more manageable through a childhood window pane.

Now a new crew has taken over
to get it running once again,
and they was up in the old tree house
with Big Jeffrey looking in.

My very first clone machine!

Over the past couple of weeks I've been messing around with urethane plastics and resins to create molds for casting sculptures. I've succeeding in breaking one of my favorite pieces and melting the corner off of my desk, but lo, I've finally succeeded!

 

I used Smooth-On brand rubbers and plastics and followed their very helpful tutorial videos. The main hiccup was finding the right area on the model to make the seam so that I could easily remove the mold without damaging the mold or the original. To see the piece I molded in better detail, click here. I ended losing about half of the original's hair, its ear, a leech on the shoulder, and the tip of the breathing apparatus. With a couple of carefully placed cuts in the mold I'm now able to get replicates that are completely intact without leaving bits in the mold (it also helps that the resin is less brittle than the original's sculpey form).

I used a quick-cure formula in my first attempt, and the resin started setting as I was pouring it into the mold. The catalyzed reaction burnt my fingers even through my glove so I dropped the melted cup on my desk which is now a warped mess. The picture above shows my second try which I went into much better prepared. The finished result unfortunately has a lot of bubbles, but every cast I do I learn more about the process.

Now I can paint copies and give/sell them to people. I'll add more pictures to this post once I've put a base coat of paint on so that the details are visible rather than transparent.

If anybody wants a monster to paint I'll happily make you a copy :-)

Lazy doodles

I'm in a bit of a rush today so I'll leave you all with some doodles, most of which were penciled while I should have been doing something more important or paying attention to something else.

Don't try to make too much sense of these:

These two are ant heads with their genus names above.

This one's an Alice in Wonderland homage.