Bride of Frankenstein

I had originally set out to do a model of Nefertiti. As soon as I started my image search,  I came upon images of the Monster's Bride. Perhaps its because so much of Egyptian art work is funerary and exalts life after death. I found myself set on a new path. While both women represent a most certain standard of beauty, Nefertiti is near crystalline in her elegance and purpose whereas the Monster's bride apes some of Nef's cool, especially in her quaf, which contains the same basic mass as the Queens ancient crown but, she's all together something else. She's actually quite the high piece of lurid Deco, pouting and succulent, lean and long, eyes wide open vexed yet amazed, designed and built to sate the hunger of an abomination.

Jack O Lantern

Rags A GoGo 3d

The image above is a Photoshop mock up that's incorporating the 3d logo, rondels and tiles. The mural with the stars and earth already exist as five painted panels that install in about two minutes. They are removed in about half that amount of time and are then stored in between the entrance and the rolling gate. This design feature and daily ritual exist in order to protect the mural from graffiti during the hours in which the store is closed. The tiled border at the bottom of the mural will simply be painted in the same manner as the rest of the mural. The banner across the front of the awning will be printed on vinyl and attached with double stick foam backed tape that is expressly designed for that purpose. The awning which is currently yellow will be painted with vinyl paints. The panels will alternate between red and blue.

Inside, the front of the store will feature 22" vinyl borders running just below the ceiling. The rear, lower portion of the stores plan, AKA "Chick Pit" will feature a 46"enlargement of the same border design. Visible walls will be painted a lovely sky blue. The floor tiles will be primed and painted with commercial floor enamels in a random pattern of primary and secondary colors.

All of the components for the border design were modeled in Zbrush with Alpha extrusions, radial symmetry tools and polypaint. The models were then rendered and brought into Photoshop for assembly, adjustment and print preparation.

Stephen Colbert Portrait, Bust, Cube X 3d Print

This little ABS bust of Steven Colbert is 6" tall and took about 13 hours to print, at medium infill and resolution on the Cube X. Like the other Cube X prints, this wasn't my first attempt. I contacted Cubify support and asked for advice. They told me to try a smaller medium resolution print set to medium density without detail preservation. I gave it a shot and this is what I got. I applied painter's tape to the build plate and then applied Magic Glue to the tape. It seemed to work but, an hour or so into the print I notices that while the ABS was sticking to the tape it was also curling with enough force to pull the tape away from the build plate. As I've read more and more, it seems that the only way to get consistent, undistorted ABS prints ( that actually stick and don't move around)is to invest in a heated build plate. They cost about $500. Ugh. Aside from the distortion in the lower part of the pedestal (will be corrected with sculpt epox) its a fairly remarkable print. It didn't come out of the machine looking like this however. I've put 6.5 hours into finishing this and could easily put another 4 or 5 hours into it before it would be ready for molding. Most of the support material did simply snap off with the exception of the scaffold supporting the chin. That bit of support required some radical carving in order to get to the intended forms beneath it. There were also two areas of this print that were a step out of register, one, through the center of the pedestal and, two, across the shoulders and through the center of the necktie's knot. They required a fair share of finessed carving and sanding to hide. All of that Said, ABS is a lovely plastic to work with. It carves and sands out very nicely and the majority of its striations can be buffed out with acetone. In fact, when applied sensitively, acetone can buff this plastic out to a finish that very closely resembles polished marble.

SHOCKING NEWS FLASH!!!... STEPHEN COLBERT COMES OUT OF THE CLOSET AND OPENLY CONFRONTS HIS INFLUENCE ON THE MARIJUANA NATION. FOR MORE IN DEPTH DETAILS ON THIS GROUND BREAKING STORY AS IT UNFOLDS, PLEASE CLICK HERE!

Game Environment Set Tile

The difference between microcosms and macrocosms is contextual. The difference between miniatures and monuments follow the same suit. Visually its a matter of placing the viewer on a sliding scale that can either put them inside of the scene with its elements towering above them a la' Honey I Shrunk the kids or, outside and above wherein the scene is simply a strange and tiny tile littered with an eruption of fantastic fungi.

Each element within the tile is a separate set piece that can be individually edited, textured, distorted, scaled or, rearranged. In order to create a continuous loop for the Skycyles to fly through, the tile is copied and rotated to present a different entrance aspect of the scene than the first tile. The rotated duplicate tile is then placed after the first tile to effectively double the length of the set. Since the Set Tile has 4 elevation sides, this process can be repeated 4 times before an image or point of view is repeated.

As these scenes represent an early stage of development, not much has been done with texturing yet and in truth I'll be sorry to obscure some of the beautiful, stretched polygon patterns but, it'll be all the more mind blowing textured as striated desert stone.

Many more Set Tiles have been discussed, mecha tiles, ruins tiles, tunnel tiles and the like. In the end, a mosaic of interchangeable set and scene transitions will be created.

In the animation the shapes get pretty crazy as they go sweeping past on the turntable. I can't wait to see tiny Skycycles flying through it from different points of perspective.

Oscar Cube X 3d Print

I've recently purchased a Cube X 3d printer. The machine itself is a thing of beauty and appears to be many times more substantially constructed than the MakerBot but, So far I'm not in love. The folks at Cubify tell me not to worry. I'm going to cross my fingers and see what happens because, while this 9" prototype is fun, its nowhere near good enough to sell and is nowhere near as refined as the fairly simple model that it was created from. If this model came out as cleanly as one of the high resolution  Cubify sample prints, I would be delighted but, as it stands now, I am not. The resolution of this supposedly high resolution model is more crude than a MakerBot medium resolution print. This model took 14 hrs. and 37 minutes. That seems like a fair amount of time for a high resolution print that is 9" tall but, its dreadfully slow for a model of this poor quality.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Strings

I think of a time, less than 7 years ago, a time when I knew no note or chord or, lyric in its entirety. My apartment seemed a bit bigger back then. As I was straightening up my disheveled domicile this morning it occurred to me that my pad's beginning to look a lot like a second hand guitar store. Of this small army of stringed musical devices, I actually only own one, a very so-so Washburn which I had first purchased in the beginning of my musical foray. Friends periodically leave their instruments in the safety of my musical haven and a fair sum of this grand plethora have been donated ensuring that the chest, so to speak, has more tools at hand. All axe's swing, so often so many in unison. With every guitar that magically appears, a little more of my living space vanishes in the wake of the instruments mass. It's a small price to pay for how my home so often sounds and for the beautiful visiting musicians whom I've been lucky enough to count as some of my dearest friends, without whom none of this would be.

10,000 Bags

This Sunday I'm off to Burning Man for the 4th consecutive year. Every year this exquisite journey is made possible by my beautiful, dear friend and neighbor, Joshua Suzanne. For the past 4 years we've traded art for paid passage in the way of websites, business cards, murals and other graphic tasks. This year I've redesigned the inside of her store and the outside of her shopping bags.

Her old bag was fun but, a little clunky and hard to read. She loved the Doctor Suessiness of the round logo (drawn by an ex-lover and partner). I kept of it what I could and did my best to match its spirit in the remaining text. My main objectives were to make it immediately read as Rags A GoGo, to do what I could to make it read from the other side of the street, and as Rags A GoGo counts many international travelers as part of its clientele, I made sure that NYC was a major focal component. As for the big heart, who doesn't love love? Boys and girls, Rags A GoGo, vintage clothing, NYC?

The old bag is yellow with black letters. It's a good combo for a quick read but, there's something very cautionary about it. In fact I believe the color is "Safety Yellow". Josh asked me if we could see the new design in different color variations. 24 quickly emerged. Of them, Josh most liked the red bag with white type,"Like Christmas and Valentines Day all year round!". Who could effectively argue that Christmas and Valentines aren't warmer and fuzzier than the severity of black ink and the color of caution tape, bees and hornets?

No sooner than I had sent the design to the bag company, I got a call back from them explaining to me that white ink doesn't work well on deeply colored plastics. The result was described to me as "muddy". I asked if we could print red on a white bag in order to achieve a similar result. I was told yes but, the printing field was limited to 10" X 12".
I tried it and hated it. It's always something isn't it?

I went on line, looking for white plastic bags with red print and found some interesting results. I tried filling as much of the bag with red print as possible. It looked great . I could see it as a tee shirt graphic but I felt that there was just a bit too much red ink for a run of 10,000. Then for some odd reason Josh's "69" Camaro popped into my head. Hmmmm, thought I. By adding the Chevy's rally stripes, I reduced the amount of ink by about 20% and not so unpredictably the bag got a lot racier. Will it work with in the current vendors template? Nope but, as I've designed this I've pondered other options and different types of bags.

Since the bag's stripes were inspired by the hood of Josh's car, I had to see what it looked like. I went on line and found this 69 camaro at Wallcapture.com . What a gorgeous old thing. Anyhow, I doctored up the shot a bit to match up the colors and plunked her graphic on the hood. It occurred to me that if she applied this as a removeable vinyl graphic, she may be able to write off the current restoration of the vehicle. It's just a thought that would require the expertise of an accountant and more importantly... would Josh want this on the hood of her baby?

Relief Mesh Extrusions Based on Moses Hacmon's Faces of Water

Of all of the places that I've gone to and, all of the people whom I've met, in all of the time that I've been, Burning Man is beyond so much of what I had previously fathomed. Fascinating folks from one end to the other, like a universe of spheres within spheres, born from inner circles. In the spirit of splendid behaviours, it is a most exquisite flower forever unfolding.

Last year, among my many beautiful camp mates, I had the pleasure of Getting to know Moses Hacmon. Moses is a collaborative artist, photographer and architect from Israel. His most recent artistic endeavors revolve around a serious of photographic works titled "Faces of Water". Moses has captured something within this substance, of which we are all mostly made and, has brought forward details and nuances that have been hitherto unknown. Within his miraculous photos I find an inner spirit or writhing rhythms and relative comparative kinetic dynamics.

A couple of days ago, Moses had posted a new image from "Faces of Water" on Facebook. Upon my seeing it I was once again blown away. I immediately commented that 3d meshes could be extruded from the photography so as to create relief panels, thus bringing the work into an even more sculptural context. In my mind, I saw walls of water, frozen at room temperature yet still in possession of their flowing, fluid splendor. Words weren't enough. I had to build a model to see for myself.

I brought one of Mozes's photos into Zbrush as a gray scaled alpha mask and extruded it through the face of a cube comprised of 16,000,000 polygons. The resulting topologies were as startling as they are gorgeous. What started out as a single sample swiftly became six as I found myself compelled to fill the cube's five remaining naked planes.

If these extruded surfaces were printed through stereo lithography or, multiple other means of rapid prototyping technology, they could be applied to vast varieties of architectural contexts. In this it would be possible to read the microcosms of fluid dynamics though one's finger tips. The materials that these surfaces could be cast as spans the gambit from glass, metals, ceramics to varieties of plastics that could be optically clear to densely opaque. They could even be cast in ice, which in a way intrigues me the most as it would be a means of seeing water through water.

All of the mesh extrusions in this experiment were pulled though single alpha masks. While the resulting surfaces seem rich with detail, they could be much further enhanced, especially in terms of roll and rollick by applying multiple masks to each relief with different exposures. Done correctly, these forms would billow more closely to the sublime gradients and deep contrasts of Mose's miraculous explorations.

In the frequencies of this veritable mountain range's topology, I'm immediately reacquainted with the fluid dynamics that govern and shape what we generally perceive to be an immobile Earth's crust. In truth, our planet's surface is a ripple that has never stopped and, never will, till it's sucked into the sun like a droplet.

Three Versions of Charles Darwin

Charles on the pedestal is a medium resolution print and is 12 inches tall, His mask a high resolution print and is 11 inches tall and finally the little guy, high res. and 6 inches tall.

Do Clowns Freak You Out?

I've heard lots of jokes about scary clowns or, how some people are just plain, old freaked out by them. I'd always thought that the jokes were funny even though I must admit that I never truly understood, having never been frightened by one myself... until sculpting this. You'd think that this clownishly happy face would engender joy with its broad toothy grin, wide, alert eyes and abundant topography of smile lines but, it doesn't, at least not in me. The more that I stare into it, the more I'm jarred and unsettled. It's so bugged out that it's hilarious. Perhaps he'd be best described as unsettlingly funny or, fearsomely friendly? Despite ambivalence and dichotomy, I find contagion in his liver lipped, shit eating grin.

I've always loved carnival and road side attraction sculpture, all of it goofy and some of the best of it is naive and hopelessly clunky. One of the grand daddy's of this genera is the Coney Island Funny Face.
In his earliest incarnations he's just so weird and mal-proportioned with his flat, half brained cranium. Through the years he's evolved though a dramatic morphology. The pinnacle of this evolution now exists in the variant that is proudly the mascot for Coney Island Lager. Hands down, he's the best designed of them all and the basis for this sculpt. The first time that I saw him emblazoned across the label I thought, what a great object this would be,... as a badge or a button or a bill board. I didn't include his piercings or facial tattoos in order to give him a more 1950's, fun for the whole family sort of feel.

He's next in line to be printed and will be a foot in diameter, as soon as a 16" tall Mr. Peanut is out of the MakerBot(printing in 3 sections).

Return to Kong

Cragged ivory, chipped and scathed emerges from gums both shrinking and swollen  to divinely dapple divided luminance upon engorged papillae or,... dig the shadows across the tongue. In this return to a long waiting model, I've changed it quite a bit for 3d print out. In the same way that Photoshop's paint is forever wet on demand, sculptures of a digital nature are forever pliant. In order to achieve a 9 inch tall print out, the mesh required being broken into 2 parts. A 4 inch base will be printed seperately and effectively raise the print out to more than a foot in height.

I'm going to be doing a lot of this in my quest to find the outer limits of what the Makerbot can do in the way creating larger models.

Charles Darwin Mask, Zbrush Model, Makerbot Print

I purchased my MakerBot Replicator 2 for the express purpose of it printing sculpture. In my researching the machine, I looked high and low for examples of printed sculpture spanning a large variety of historical genres. At first, I found unsurprisingly little but, about a year ago Thingaverse started to exhibit models that were derived from photogrammetery. For those of you whom are unfamiliar with the term, photogrammetery is a technology that builds 3d models by stitching a serious of relative photos together through a process of identifying common features and land marks within the photos and creating an algorithm that proportionally joins all of the photos into a 3d model. In other words, if you take a bunch of photos of something, there are programs such as Auto Desk's 123d Catch, that will turn it into sculpture. It's really that simple. It's an amazing way to capture gross geometry but, being photography based, shadows and reflections often confuse the process and much of the details often become unrecognizable lumps and bumps. The models can however be post processed and cleaned up quite nicely. The point is that I finally found examples of classical sculpture printed out by a Makerbot and knew by that, it would suite my intended purposes for the machine.

 For this rendition of Charles Darwin, I basically sliced the face and beard off of the bust that I had created in Zbrush. I decimated the polygon count to about a quarter of a million and brought it into MakerWare as an .stl file. I scaled the model for the maximum size and set resolution to high. The print is 10.5 inches high and 6 inches across. It took 19 hours and 43 minutes to print. To date this is one of the most interesting prints that I've pulled off of the machine. It stands as a great example of what the MakerBot is capable of. While the print is not without striation, a surprising amount of subtle nuance has made it through in the way of wrinkles and skin textures. It's a great proof of concept. I see by this that the machine could create life sized busts. My guess is that a life sized Charles Darwin bust could be printed in 8 sections and would probably require 150 hours of printing.

Zbrush Characters

Crif Dogs

Back when my buddy Eric was in the hospital facing what would be his last days, I had a need to dress up his room with a pin up girl indicative of our neighborhood. Crif Dogs is one of the quirkiest, subversive, hot dog joint/secret absinthe bars in the world (as if there are others by which to compare). Crif dog's girl with dog mascot was perfect for this. I took their flat art and did my best to give her life in Photoshop. As I got into the girl I became obsessed by the theme of their menu and ended up redesigning the whole thing. It's funny how that goes sometimes. As I look at this artwork for the first time in a while and, I consider that their dogs are both beef and pork. If I were to re-do the center panel on the price side of the menu, I'd seat her side saddle on a pig/cow hybrid. A CatDog sort of thing. Would that be so bizarre that it could kill an appetite or, so amusing that you'd be compelled to explore? My niece Jessica commented that the Ed McMahon panel made her think that hot dogs plus beer equal good teeth.

Character Studies

This is a series of quick characters that I derived from a single base mesh. The elestisity of Zbrush never fails to astonish me.

Charles Darwin Makerbot Print

If everyone has their own personal Pantheon, a place in which their heroes reside, Charles Darwin is among the giants in mine. For a species obsessed by having an unending hunger for evidential explanations, he sated all of man kind and allowed Science and biology to move forward in ways it never had in the past. For the first time since life began it's founding primordial writhing, he opened the door to the Genome and, in so doing, charted a course for filling in the blanks of a billion years of ignorance. It was a privilege to sculpt him.

I'm particularly pleased with this shot. This bust is only 6" tall yet it manages to maintain it's classical air as if it were fully life sized. Charles was printed on my MakerBot Replicator 2 at a high resolution setting and took 7.5 hrs. If you squint a little, so as to obscure the striations, it becomes easy to see this as  marble, not bad for what is really a hot melted extrusion of corn starch based biodegradable plastic printed on my desk top.

Family Life Masks

Some 30 years ago my mother commissioned Willa Shalit (daughter of Gene Shalit) to make life masks of the immediate family. The masks are low resolution plaster bandage casts as opposed to higher resolution casts achieved by molds made from alginate or silicone. In these, every detail and pore are not revealed but, in that something somehow is gained. As fascinating as medical grade surface information can be in it's portrayal of every nuance, crease and crevice, it sometimes distracts us from the underlying geometries and those beauties and truths therein. A good friend of mine had described it as the difference between a sketch and a highly finished drawing. Sometimes the sketch is more beautiful.

As time marched on the masks had discolored, 3 decades of dirt had settled in unflattering ways. My mother asked me if I could restore them and give them a scenic bronze finish. The masks were lightly spackled, primed and given a quick deliberately rough faux bronze paint treatment as they would be mounted high on a wall over a bay window and need to be read at a distance.

There was a strangeness returning to these masks. Children are a frightening clock. In these masks, my mother is approximately my age and I am my daughters. As I moved the masks around my studio, looking for interesting settings and light, I posed my mothers mask with the cast of Sonia with here eyes opened. There's a startling "Back to the Future"effect in that suddenly Bubby's the same age as Pops and Sonia's the same age as my youngest sister, Nikki.

My father's mask is conspicuously missing from these photos. My parents divorce was particularly bitter and my mother no longer wanted it in the house. My fathers face now finds it's self in my younger sister, Alisa's home.

These masks also signifiy my introduction to life casting. Shortly after these masks were cast I would serve as Willa's assitant for a series of classes that she taught in plaster bandage and alginate life casting at the New York Accadamy.

3d Oscar

It seems that almost every year I bid on an Oscar project or 2. I've never landed one though. It's true what they say, the Oscar is illusive. The issues have always been more about time frame than budget. The Oscar is a deceivingly complicated sculpt in that, beyond the figure it's self, all of the shapes and surfaces are highly developed and polished. As it's so well know, there is no room for interpretation. It has to be spot on, which is never cheap and speedy. 

         

                                                                             

In my quest to become proficient in 3d modeling I often choose subject mater that is either based on past analog projects or something with a marketable potential. Now that this model exists, the next time an Oscar job arises, time will be a much lesser issue in that all of the most difficult work has already been done. Over sized copies can be milled out of foam in various densities by carving robots. Actual size versions could be rapid prototyped in a number of material from plastics to bronze. Miniature could be printed in silver or gold. An Oscar could even be carved out of marble, remarkably, all from this one model.

As I pondered how many ways Oscar could be reproduced, I considered how many times he actually has. It must be thousands. 

10.5" tall Oscar 3d print from Shapeways just came in. There are some faint print lines but, over all, it's pretty damned close to the art work.

When I first posted the renderings for this piece, I promised that the print would be coming with a twist... This is it. The statue screws on to the base. It seems like such a simple thing that we all take for granted with every bottle cap that we've ever encountered but, let me tell you, there are a lot of steps and consideration to the single winding thread that must be impressed into 3 different surfaces, each with varying spaces and minute tolerances between them. Not only did it work perfectly but it transformed the Oscar from merely being a decorative object to being a useful container with a screw on lid.