Working drawings

Just posted here some working drawings of images that are in progress. These are done in Adobe Illustrator. Took around three hours. Plan is to print them out onto suitable paper and then finish them off by hand. Concerned about the costs of paying someone to do this, might investigate cost of A3/A2 printer, although I didn't get monies worth out of the last one really.

Moulding ficticious fossils

Work goes on with the radioactive wireless creatures. In addition to carefully documenting the animals, although I'm increasingly thinking that this is a form of mineral based creature rather than any cellular based organism; work has gone moulding fictitious fossils. Here you can see the moulds and a shelf full of fossils carefully being dried out. Once they have dried, they will be glazed to preserve them and electricity radiation detectors fitted.

The True Meaning of Christmas

It's about this time of the year that churches get their knickers in a twist about the true meaning of Christmas. We are reminded that we are celebrating the birth of Christ and that all the tinsel and tat and over-commercialisation is obscuring what it's really all about. This sermon will be delivered by a preacher in front of a Christmas tree and possibly surrounded by small children dressed in vague approximations of middle eastern costume.

Sadly, as far as I am concerned, the church has this 180 degrees out of phase.

The true meaning of Christmas is not about baby Jesus, it's about parties, presents and celebration. In fact most people have got Christmas just about right when it comes down to it. It's the church, which hijacked a pagan festival, developed its own white lies around the festival and has to repaint it each year in an attempt to keep the facade up that has got it wrong. Even "Bible-Believing" churches can happily stand on their heads for the festive season; pointing out even simple falsehoods wins no prizes as a myriad of excuses for continuing the tradition come to the fore.

The shape of an electric field.

OK, so this is part of a much bigger project.
I got the slab like plastic piece in picture one from a charity shop. It's the base unit from a plasma ball and inside it has a battery powered high voltage, high frequency generator. Bit like a small tesla coil - although as far as I can see it's pretty much solid state. Any coils are hidden in a block of epoxy resin inside.

I got it to try to make the violet ray work - which it did after a fashion and yesterday had a thought and wondered if it would make a small neon bulb glow as well. It does, quite nicely. The neon isn't attached to anything, although if you touch the wires the bulb glows brighter. In fact, if you touch the wires lightly you get a small arc of electricity in-between your finger and the wire which burns small holes in your skin.
I then was showing this to a friend who asked how far away it worked, and thoughts turned to plotting the effective range. These photos are the outcome of that thinking. The block is switched on in almost total darkness. The camera is set for 90 seconds (total) exposure and the neon bulb is waved around in the air above the block. What is revealed (unsurprisingly really) is a dome shaped field of energy above the block. I also measured the voltage from the neon's wire: 320 vac.

I'm going to use these bulbs as eyes in my bug sculptures. They also light up quite happily from static electricity. 150 are arriving tomorrow from an electronics wholesaler!
SS

Edwardian Daleks

As part of the ongoing Mechanicals project, I have been looking through old electrical and electronics magazines. In particular I have been struck by the speculative thinking found in the "Electrical Experimenter" magazine. The cover here was published in 1918, towards the end of the Great War and when new technology was changing the way wars were fought.

I find the resemblance between the automatic soldiers in the trenches and Daleks uncanny. I only wish I could actually get hold of a copy (Yes, I know I can pay large sums of money to some US citizen.) and see the detail in the drawing. The jpeg below that I found in several places on the web simply isn't detailed enough. The body shape, in particular the head and the cable/piping around the head particularly resonate Terry Nation's creation. I was reminded of the appearance of the Dalek in the last season with Winston Churchill.

Interestingly in this picture the armaments appear to be machine guns. I realise that this was hot technology at the time, but in other articles in the magazine a death ray either produced electrically or from radium is proposed. In fact there's another cover with walking tanks using radium dearth rays published a few months before hand.

Electrical Experimenter has been a fruitful source of both practical early circuits and edwardian speculative articles. If you look at the early editions they are grounded pretty much in fact, but as the magazine progresses it slips more and more towards speculation. Nevertheless, it's an eye-opening window into what the future was supposed to look like nearly a hundred years ago, and unlike many similar publications, the predictions are closer to what actually happened in some cases.

Ceramics at the Podium, Bath

I have a few small items in the exhibition space at the Podium, Bath, they are there until 10/11/10. There are:

Two of my creatures.

Three small buildings, the "house at the Bottom of the Garden" that's on the being one that I'm particularly proud of. That is an experiment using coils of clay which are then subsequently covered in black clay slip and rubbed down. As you see it here, it has a wax finish, but when the show is over I will burn that off and put a glaze on. The crank clay is too rough a finish to take the wax.

The bowl that I completed on the eve of the exhibition that is made from coiled clay and coloured slip. It's polished with wax rather than glazed as this gives a much softer shine, and one that builds up over time. The finish in real life looks like bone, and is a lot lighter than it looks in this picture. I sanded and polished the bowl before firing it.

The last one here, the blue figure, is called Lament. It's dedicated to Ruth and is her favourite piece.

Thoughts on print buying.

I'm not an expert on print buying. I know two people who are*. But I'm still amazed at what people pay for getting stuff printed. Of all the things I get as part of my work, print costs vary the most. As a designer, when I get involved in the print side I simply pass on the cost. Any markup is minimal and I include a management fee if I negotiate with the printer. I think clients are unhappy now with so called agency markups of 20-50% on their print bills.

Having said that I don't always use the cheapest printer and I don't spend hours shopping around. I tend to use people that I've had consistent good results from and from who I know I'll get a good result. Also I want as much automation as possible, I want to be able to upload files and get them in the print queue as soon as they are ready to go. I want the process to be predictable and repeatable. And I want guaranteed turnarounds.

*one of them lives here: http://www.printbydesign.co.uk/, and no, they haven't paid for this ad, nor are they expecting it to appear.