Sand Castle Video Cabinet and Play Tables

A Great artist once said "Castles made of sand fall in the sea, eventually". I say, not if they're carved from EPS and coated with an isocyanate polyurethane resin...and installed a fair enough distance from the ocean. Immediately upon the completion of the Dolphin Sofa for SFDS, I went to work on these sand castles. While the basic geometry of these pieces seemed simple enough, their textures demanded a lot of time and attention.

Once the basic shapes were assembled, and the television monitor was properly fitted, all 3 pieces required staggered block patterns. This represents a lot more work than many would guess. The patterns were first measured and drafted over the majority of the surfaces. In the case of the tables, all sides required detail, where as the video cabinet has a smooth back. The drafted patterns were then hot scored into the surfaces and all of the pieces were tied together and further textured with joint compound before hard coating and paint treatments were applied.

The play tables center spaces were filled with sand and sea shells and topped with glass and plexi. The video cabinet was not only fitted with a 52"monitor but an Xbox and other ancillary digital goodies. The sunglass on the far end of this shot sport double monitors (the shades were cut on the CNC machine, I merely glued the parts together and rounded the edges). All of the wonderful stools and beach ball chairs were designed and fabricated by SFDS. In the end an incredible childrens play space was created, one that will host and inspire much joy and laughter for many years to come.

I'd like to further thank Eric Winston and SFDS for providing me with and allowing my use of their images of the pieces installed in their intended environments. Every aspect of working with this fine studio was a pleasure and a privilege. I happily look forward to my next projects with them.

Chinese Dragon

The Chinese Dragon pictured here is easily the largest single foam carving that I'd ever had my hands in. It was created for the Fun Town Splash Town amusement park in Sacco Maine. I based the design on a China town bit of kitche, a small, resin dragon statuette with exceptionally good details. The back was perfectly arched so as to serve as a portal through which park goers would enter the attraction. Aptly named Dragon's Descent,  you're strapped into it's specialized seats and harness system and the 220' tall tower slowly begins carrying you aloft to one of the highest and most majestic panaramas in all of Maine, before brutally hurtling you downward at speeds greater than the gravitational pull of the earth could achieve without the colossal, maniacal mechanical assistance of this terrifying towers sadistically concocted inner workings. I cut off the statuette's head and turned it inward to face the guests whom would be passing under it's belly. Once the model had been modified, it was photographed and 1/12 scale drawings were made from those photos. The drawing were then projected onto 3/4" plywood. The shapes would be cut from the plywood and the plywood was scabbed together and joined by flanged steel pipes to serve as 2' wide hollow, structural core, upon which would be mounted a total of 36 2' x 2' x 8' EPS foam blocks for carving. The dragon was so large that it had to be designed in 4 sections that would be craned together on site. In fact, it required 2  40' flat bed trailers to safely transport its separated components to the park. The full sculpture would be 18.5' tall, 32' long and 12' wide. It's eyes and throat glowed crimson red with inner lamps as smoke would billow out of it's nostrils and mouth via Rosco smoke machines and an inventive PVC plumbing system. The dragon also had a sound box with a proximity switch inside of it, allowing the dragon to growl as guests approached. A lavish Chinese garden was planted as the attraction's setting to complete the visual spectacle.

This story wouldn't be complete without a word on Maine lobster. Everything that you've heard is true. It is orgasmic. We were tied to the installation for the better part of that week and enjoyed lobster rolls every day for lunch. There was simply nothing better. On our last day we went to a local lobster shack right on the water. The lobster was so fresh that we had speculated that it was being pulled in fresh from the shack's kitchen window. I had a lobster bisk, velvety red with roe, so thick and rich and chock full of lobster that my spoon  actually stood up in it. That course was followed by a "Lazy Man's" lobster, which consisted of 2lbs. of shelled lobster claws and tails in an earth ware bowl that had been broiled in a bath of butter and bread crumbs to beyond what mere mortals could describe as perfection. There is a heaven. My taste buds call it Sacco Maine.

Horton

Being my age, I had the luxury of growing up with Suess & Sendak. So did my daughter and it's my hope that children do for as long as there are children but, I grew up as these books were just hitting the book store shelves. At that time most of my toys were made out of wood or metal. I think that the quality of a toy may have been determined by how much injury it could inflict upon another child if it should be used as a weapon. I remember my father telling me that when he was a child he knocked out his little sisters front teeth with a toy fire engine. Those were the days, when toys were toys and child psychology didn't exist. If I'm to believe my pop's story, my grandfather put his cigar out on my pop's prepubescent nose for his dastardly dental deed.
 Of all of Dr. Suess's characters, Horton was the one that most impressed me. To my young mind he was as big as a T Rex but he was gentle and kind and generous to a fault. He meant what he said and he said what he meant and his mind was opened to possibilities out side of his norm, 100 percent. Imbued with those fine qualities, I thought that he would make a great sample and studio mascot. I carved Horton using a tiny Christmas ornament as my reference. Ear to ear he may have been an inch and a half across. As he hangs on my wall he's five feet wide.

Little Airstream

A seriously fun project for an amusement park attraction, entirely carved from 1lbs. EPS., including the wheels and tires. It was very easy to dream variations on these happy simple shapes. I would have loved to have built a mold of this and cast a Fiberglas shell that could be bolted to a landscape trailer. In the bottom photo, I wanted to present the door both opened and closed. When the 2 photos were together, they were so close in terms of color balance and exposure that I couldn't help but, to join them as one.

Kong's Noggin

Above, Shape ways SLS 3d print 8" tall.

I've just spent a fair amount of this week revisiting this project. I thought that I would do a little detailing and build a nice simple base in order to get it to print, instead, I ended up rebuilding the model entirely. The fur texture was a mind bending amount of work but, I learned a lot about re-topology and controlling the orientation of the mesh. This model at it's lowest geometry is around 35k polys and nearly 30 million polys at it's highest. As I look at this models revision, I'm almost embarassed by the earlier model but, such is progress. Rome wasn't built in a day and skills take years. In this instance 3 years past between the original and the revision.

In defense of the original model below, It was created to emulate a a 14' tall carving that I had just completed and as such, the amount of detail wasn't over the top. It also represents one of my first forays with poly painting.

This is another case of Zbrush vs hand carving. I was brought in to carve the head and body of this beast and make sure that they fit the hands, teeth and eyes. Those components were being fabricated by other artists. There was a thumb nail and some free hand marker drawings on foam core. There were some photos of gorillas but little else, no model or, elevations of any kind. In their absents this was a much more arduous task than it had to be. When the sculpture was installed at Madame Tussaud's it did look splendid however.

 Once the project was completed, I considered the 3 weeks that I had just spent with hot wires and wire brushes and decided to revisit Kong's noggin with Zbrush. In the good old days, you'd build a model out of clay or foam and make your working drawings from it. From there you'd begin the sculpt and continue using the model as reference. With Zbrush, the model becomes the drawings and all the data necessary for the finished sculpture. For this application, the face and hands would be milled in higher density foam in order to preserve details. The body would be milled in lower density so as to save weight and expense. The interior of the mouth would be rapid prototyped. In that, all of the delicate ridges of the teeth, fine bumps on the tongue and other contrasting surfaces would be well represented. A while later I would be called upon by another studio to create Zbrush models of both the Chrysler Building and the Empire State building for SLS out put. Having done this and those I'd say that this whole project could have been sculpted in it entirety, in side the computer and ready for the robots in just over a week.

 I love the last photo in this post. In white, Kong looks more like the Abominable Snow man. How cool would it be to cover a sculpt like this in white synthetic fur and have him swatting at a machine gun Santa with flying sleigh and reindeer? I'm sure that I must have seen that somewhere. I just can't put my finger on it.

Google Image Search

Since I've started this blog under my full name, I've been delighted to find that a fair pecentage of images from every posting finds it's way to this page. It doesn't seem to sellect images by date for some reason but, in that, it presents a lovely scrambled mosaic of my recent work and of course, every image in this veritable wall of work is a link to descriptions and stories and the rest of my body of work that is presented on line. To visit my Google image search page please click HERE.

MakerBot and Me

I've recently purchased MakerBot's Replicator 2. I've followed MakerBot's progress for a number of years. I was always fascinated by it but, never overly impressed by the crudeness of it's output's striations. As soon as I learned that the resolution has increased many fold, I bought one. "Pull it out of the box and watch the magic happen" has not quite been my experience so far but, I am beginning to figure it out and my prints are getting better. June will mark 2 years of  my sculpting inside of the computer. As a result I have a lot of models that have only seen the virtual light of day, It's my hope by this purchase that I will soon be printing models daily. For large and or more detailed models and sculpture, I will still need the services of my extraordinary vendor, his monster Zprinter and his 7 axis carving robot but, for smaller, faster proof of concept models this desktop 3d printer should prove very useful.