Duck Photos #1
I take a lot of photos of ducks! Today I was hoping to dig up the first ducks-in-trees photos I ever took but I couldn’t find them 🙁
Anyhow, here’s a pair of wood duck parents and their well-sheltered young. Taken in August 2010.
The Disco Banjo
The first of a couple of builds for which I collaborated with my father (ie, palmed off the hard work to).
The Concept
The concept for this comes, of course, from KoL. The epic weapon of the disco bandit is a banjo crafted out of a disco ball. Serendipitously, just as the idea to create the thing came to me, a fellow student at life-drawing classes showed me some photos of instruments made out of food tins. I started googling around and found that banjos made of cookie tins are actually quite widely made by artists and traveling musicians (the can itself is a great storage device) and there are many guides to making them around the place.
Eventually, my internet travels led me to a site explaining how to create a banjo out of a gourd, and this became the basis of the disco banjo.
The Making
I bought a disco ball from Cheap-as-Chips and peeled off mirror sections until I found the seam along which the hemispheres of the ball were connected. Lots of photos from this stage, cos I had a lot of fun with it! Except when the thing first split open and noxious plasticy fumes filled my lungs.
Lifting off the first piece.
A stanley knife was sufficient to break into the plastic.
Leaving a bisected disco ball on a career-disco bandit’s keyboard is like leaving a severed horse head on someone’s pillow.
Testing the resonance of the ball using some fishing wire, a spare violin bridge and some newspaper.
Once the disco ball was dealt with, I purchased a drum head, banjo strings and guitar pegs and drafted some timber guides for my father to do the woodwork.
Disco bongo. An 8″ drum head fits perfectly over the half-disco ball.
The neck.
A piece to go inside the banjo body in order to support the shape of the disco ball and provide a mounting point for the neck.
Preparing a hole for the timber to go through. I used a piece of paper of the same size/shape as the cross-section of the wood as my guide.
Sadly there are no more progress shots from here on as I passed everything over to my dad and he assembled the whole thing with expert craftsmanship.
Suddenly, it’s done!
I used the many left over mirror sections to decorate the drum head.
Extra notes
The tailpiece is a separate piece of timber, screwed from the outside of the ball to the bracer piece on the inside. It also sits over the rim of the drum to hold things in place.
The banjo is fretless and tuned in fifths as I played ‘cello way back when.
Doubt
Blaugust is back, which means more blogging! I’m hoping to be able to provide lots of content this time, with the crutch of “old art” to help me fulfill that goal.
Click for larger view!
This piece is from my life drawing classes last year. The assignment involved drawing a self-portrait involving three figures composed in some kind of narrative. We were also supposed to take stylistic lead from another artist.
I chose to emulate Marlene Dumas’ ink drawings as I was at the time experimenting quite heavily with watercolours and inks. I combined her use of unpredictable washes with the sharply defined edges that can be attained by using masking fluid.
I got quite wrapped up in the narrative and the symbolism. I think our lecturer was specifically addressing me when she cautioned us against turning the assignment into an illustrative work. And although the assortment of (mostly) round shapes in the background on the right seem quite arbitrarily chosen, there is a meaning attached to each.
Invader Cookies
Shortbread dough probably wasn’t the best suited to this, but I like shortbread.
Response – Inks
Had these lying around since Sunday, was just stalling on scanning and stitching them together.
Number of times I smudged the ink terribly: about 3.
Response
Pencils for a comic page based on this dialogue.
This initially looked like it could easily be two or three pages but since I was having trouble identifying the best places to split the pages I challenged myself to fit it all in one. The dialogue’s pretty dense as a result. It’s funny how right I was in places about the space the text would take, and how so very wrong I was in others.
Interpreting the text and turning it into something visually interesting was tricky too. I didn’t want it to be talking heads the whole way through the page so I injected some personality, emotion and body language. In fact the driver behind this interpretation was the visual of Cedar’s outstretched arms as he displayed the marks on them to Nirri. Of course I then gave him an outfit that changed his movements doing so, but I’m glad I didn’t stick steadfastly to the original image in my head.
Cupboard
Was going to use this as the first post of March Blog Madness then completely forgot.
Drawn from life at one of JP’s Miyazaki Fridays.