I’ve posted about my joint project with Asa Foster III WE BE MONSTERS before, but in my intense desire to dive into summer and shed the icky residue Junior year left on my mind, I forgot to post the end result of our semester-long tribulations!
I’m massively proud of our work on the BEHEMOTH, a quadraped collaborative puppet. It’s cute, fun, and techy- enough to pass Interactive Art, Computational Design with flying colors (no easy feat, coming from a pair of undergraduate art students in a mostly graduate level class).
Click the header image to go to our blog post over at golancourses.net, detailing our creative and tech processes, complete with snappy video & screencaps.
It was the most fun I’ve had with a partner project, and you can tell in the video- I was all giggles.
SO I HAVE DECIDED that after an increasingly frustrating Junior year, full of no sleep, tears, and way too many canned starbucks doubleshots (the kind that look like tiny batteries and taste about the same), that this summer is going to be AWESOME.
no matter what. AWESOME. AWESOME. AWESOME. I will rinse & repeat this mantra until it comes true.
One of my many summer plans was to read. read. read. read. read. read. read. I miss having the time to spend an entire day plowing through a good book. I will re-aquatint myself with this phenomenon this summer. <3 Last week I powered through Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy; it was a re-read, but one of the more rewarding re-reads I’ve done in a good long time. I don’t have enough praise in me for those books. If you haven’t read them yet, GO! But disregard the Golden Compass movie, it’s pretty terrible and whitewashed.
Anyway; I drew along as I was reading. More HDM pen & inks coming soon… every other chapter made me want to break out my pens & paper.
The Lyra/Iorek scenes were especially inspirational… every little girl should have The King of Armored Bears as a friend.
More soon. Ta!
-c.r.b
Dear internet,
I realized I’ve been talking about my digital fabrication project without posting any sort of in progress shots or sketches! That is simply not decent blog etiquette, so without further ado, here’s an image-heavy explaination of what I’ve been up to.
so
I’m making a wall-mounted, motor driven kinetic sculpture of a rat king
in the form of a (sort of) mandala,
inspired in part by The Rat King two-player flash game I made with Timothy Sherman last semester in Paolo Pedercini’s experimental game design class - if you collect enough rats, you end up with these wriggling little rat-mandalas that I thought were too cool. I’ve had a running fascination with rats & the lore around them since keeping them as pets back in high school, so… this was really just another excuse to make something ratty (and a break from the recent bout of batty, heehee). Why are all my favorite animals so spooky? (Although I like aardvarks and big fluffy dogs too, and those aren’t all that spook-tastic.)
I’m in the process of making a small(er) scale version right now in an attempt to figure out the mechanics of the piece - the final work will be roughly 3 feet in diameter. The sculpture features nine small rats rotating slowly right, and nine larger rats rotating slowly left; all the while, their 18 little pairs of legs run in place- all of the parts, both sculptural and mechanical, are cut out of 1/8th hardboard, since it’s cheap and takes paint nicely.
In a perfect world, this would be made out of acrylic plastic, but that’s pricey and I am a student who likes to be able to go grocery shopping. Maybe in the future I’ll make a shiny plastic version, like my Wild Family Dog .
Last night I cleared off my big studio work table and put all my currently known pieces into piles, before beginning the assembly process.
that guy on the far right is a screw up, the back of the board had some etching on it. whooooops.
and I know the driving gears behind the turning mechanism- a set of planetary gears inside of an internal gear;
kinda like
but I think I’m going to have to get everything put together and working before I can wrap my brain around what I need to add to get the legs moving. I know each rat is going to need it’s own-something or other- to get this running, which means more layers, which means figuring out how to get it both mechanically stable and aesthetically pleasing… and also have the ability to stay on the damn wall.
I’ve currently got little to no idea how to do this.
So… that’ll be fun.
And that’s what I’ve been working on.
(completely unrelated but I have to share)
I will leave you with a picture of a Mountain Goat with a wombat.
If that doesn’t give you warm fuzzies then you are broken inside. I bid you adieu, internet.
<3
Things have been rough this month, in the Land of Caitlin; & what else is there to do when the going gets tough, but hunker down, listen to We Shall All Be Healed & The Sunset Tree, and draw bats with increasingly ridiculously intricate linework?
It’s cathartic, I promise.
I’m also getting faster! Each bat only takes about 2+ hours now, as opposed to… who knows how long, when I first started experimenting with silly amounts of linework.
other news
Finals are practically upon us, so I’m clicking into workaholic mode- without which I’d never be able to run the gauntlet that finals always inevitably turns into. If I was a superhero, my powers would be buckling down and getting an impossible amount of stuff done at the last minute.
I would be useless fighting crime, but probably pretty good with paperwork. Sigh.
Anyway.
My three big projects are a finalized version of We Be Monsters, screenprinted victorian-esque wallpaper made out of all of the bats I’ve been drawing, & a 3 ft tall wall-mounted automata. This weekend is going to be almost entirely focused on w.b.m., since it’s due on the 20th (!!!!!!!) and there’s still a lot to do (!!!!!!), but I have a lot of work to get done for the automata, as well. Only a few weeks left in the semester, and then Junior year is over…!
s c a r y.
…but this is a peacock.
A pen & ink piece inspired by the lovely and devastating album, Tallahassee, by The Mountain Goats. The final piece is 11 x 14, done with an 03 and an 04 Pentel hybrid technica pen, as well as a thicker marker for the darker lines.
I restarted this one a few times before I got a face on the peacock I was happy with; everything else flowed in a spiral out from that point. I think I’d like to do a series of Tallahassee pen and ink works, centering on the animal iconography present in songs like Idylls of the King, Alpha Rats Nest, and most obviously, Peacocks.