MFA Thesis 2010

This blog documents some experiments I did between 2008 and 2010 in developing my thesis project for Digital Art & New Media. My project started, as you can see below, as a sculptural exploration  (I am always interested in finding out whether I am capable of something). There were those who told me that the organic shapes I was seeking to create could not be done in cardboard, and I proceeded to prove this thinking wrong, as far as I’m concerned.

Midway through my MFA program, I turned my efforts entirely to animation, and abandoned this sculptural endeavor. I’ll hang on to this blog for a while though, as it’s kinda the only remnant of those early efforts…

experiments in materials

January 23, 2009 – after having modelled a mask in Blender using tutorials, I tried numerous ways to try to make that digital 3d model come out in real media in 3d (whatever “real” means) …this process could have been alot easier if i’d wanted to break down and buy a product like waybe – or if the demo worked, which it doesn’t seem to on my computer for some reason, try though I may to download it… sigh… so I just tabled the strategy of printing a foldable version of a 3d model for now, and started with different strategies for getting cardboard to look like a face…

I searched the surface of the digital face in Blender, for places to start. Had a few false starts trying to start by building a nose in space– just didn’t work– so went by way of sortofa silhouette…

following the map sketched out in the Blender tutorial, I laid down something like crossections, which I soon decided was going to be the only way…

…By the way, I know that ultimatelly it could be possible that the face is the one thing I won’t have to build from cardboard– if I find the right sized internals, potentially I could just used a purchased plasic mask… But I’m going along with the intention, ongoing, to make sure I’m able to create the most difficult parts of the sculpture, the face being definatelly one, by hand if need be….

…call it peace of mind 🙂

Alternating types of cardboard, all of it of a stiff and thick grade, reveal the contours… the corners of the mouth, though, might have been inaccurate…

The nose, as you’d expect, was as much a mystery as thumbs or fingertips.

…Elevated the layers, using the same technique with which cardboard is made thicker: with an inner layer of accordioned cardboard, holding the two at an exact distance apart with surprising sturdiness…

I stuck in tubes for the eye sockets, thinking that such a tube would be desirable, ultimatelly.

…I noticed at some point that the mouth was flat… said I’d handle that on the next round…

Filling in….

Despite its flaws, despite its being more face than mask for being filled in behind the surface and uninhabitable/inoccupyable, the seeming sense of personality comes through into the curious properties of cardboard, one of my very favorite recyclables..

I took this as I take them all: as a draft, as yet one more in a long series of drafts. If I start to think of the thing as a final version, it would exhaust me from further work.

I took then to creating the next one…

Here is the sketch in 2d, which would become the crossectins of the next face….

Elevated the layers the same as before…

Tried a little something different with the lips.. Then looking at it, realized those lips were way too big (scale is something I’ll have to look at later– one part of the face is very prone to jump much longer/wider/deeper/etc than the other..) so converted what would have been the lower lip, to the chin… liked the change…

…you can’t see that change here- but basically just bent the lower globules down…

Then started filling in this one!!

Went back to that captivating shape, the “lip” shape (or the fish, or tendon, or feather, or some-odd whatever-youd-like-to-call-it shape) and it was going well….

…On this one, I forgot to put that tube in the eyes… See the next shot for the effect that makes…

And the face is filled!

I did one less layer than I did with the last one– the first face had this bottom layer which was round, which really rounded out the rest– this one’s got alot curvier temples as a result… maybe an oops, maybe just something to be refined…

His (his?) mouth looks really unhappy tho…

The eyes on this one took on those curvy shapes almost of their own accord.. I couldn’t get the right one to look as good as the left one though…

I managed to get the mouth to be 3d this time… By way of making sure the extreme ends of both lips curved back one layer of crossection….

Now here’s where the real adventure starts… using the experiments in face-building for an entirely different experiment: an experiment in things to cover them with.

I got out the fiberglass resin/hardener, but I told myself that for now, I was just going to cover it with the resin, no fiberglass for now, just to see what would happen…

I paid extra special care to the mixing this time– won’t be being careless about that part of the process again anytime soon after last quarter’s little problem….

Now I don’t know about you, but I like the way it looks at this stage. Maybe it’s my favorite stage in this whole process. And what’s awesome is, a few hours after painting on resin, the thing is as hard as a rock!! (fixing one of the few probs with using cardboard 🙂 🙂 )

I’ve seen lots of fiberglass projects where the addition of fiberglass/resin over cardboard kinda looks yucky compared with how just the plain cardboard looked… You know, strange tho it may seem, cardboard turns out to be, in addition to terribly useful, an actually quite good-looking substance if you give it the chance– Fiberglass cloth is still rather unruly if you get my meaning– takes a different level of finessing than the other elements in the process. But actually, maybe we could consider using resin alone… Future project, as I see it…

Now this is the part that might break your heart– I admit I can’t fully admit to liking the outcome either…

But I just had to see what happens if you use Bondo– and I had a can of the stuff– I honestly wasn’t sure what Bondo was, or what it looked like, how it behaved or what it was going to do– all I knew was that it’s commonly mentioned as the final step of a fiberglass project– now the color is this wierd silly-putty color– like some strange cartoony skin color– kinda gives it a spooky look– I do actually also have white pigment (I kinda went on a Tap Plastics shopping spree last quarter to make sure I’d have plenty of different ways to play) but I wanted to see how it looked without first… Maybe next time use it… And wow Bondo sure cures fast! I was barely able to get over a quarter of the face before it really started turning into harder and harder paste… Next time I might just plan to do only a quarter of area at once– either that or look for retardant for Bondo… After that, it was relatively easy to sand down… It didn’t sand down quite as smooth as I imagined, but then maybe I just need to work at it longer. That’s possible– I never actually really sanded much before 🙂 Take a comparing glance at the moment, at the before and after of the Bondo for this one– doesn’t the cardboard look robotic??  I find that interesting… You know the problem with covering under-bodies with a smooth substance, sometimes, is that you can no longer see the *effort* that went into that underbody… The ‘finalizing’ step can sometimes turn out dissappointing for that reason… But as I said before, these are all ‘drafts’ and will keep being drafts for a while to come– thinking this way keeps me from dissappointment 🙂

Now there was one other material that I obtained in eagerness recently, that I was dying to try out: Acryllic Modelling Paste… I smeared it around that first one– it was really quite frosting-like…

…And here it is after a bit of work with the sandpaper…

…Yeah, I know, kinda snow-man-ish… maybe my under-structure needs to be more skinny or wiry for this material…Or maybe I need to lay it on more thinly… Or actually, maybe I need to work on the way I lay it on– seeing as I just used a plastic knife for the job, I can see that happening 🙂 Yes, I could try to be more careful with that next time I use the modelling paste… Or maybe I could mix it with water to get it thinner?

Well, here’s the outcomes of this weekend (so far) two very different materials covering two somewhat differently constructed cardboard underforms— one material being a heavy, thick ready-to-apply acryllic-based paste, and the other being a material usually used to repair the bodies of cars… Both are pretty strong, the Bondo is much lighter, and they were both kinda hard to sand… I could probably layer on more goo of various kinds, to try to get it smoother– but for now I’ll leave these be… I think I kinda like the Bondo one, the more I look at it… kinda creepy/stoney– unfortunatelly looks like more like a bad job with ceramic clay though than any kind of synthetic plastic, but we live and learn 🙂

And I am tired now! That was all very surprisingly exhausting, even though alot of those last steps were, well, all about waiting for things to dry. You know, I think somehow some of my less-than-satisfaction comes with the lack of detail– and I think that came about partly as a result of the kinda primitive and inelegant tools I’m using (plastic knife, and big metal putty spreader) and the fact I’m doing most of the work outside where there’s little light because I’m paranoid about fumes lingering in the house 🙂 Maybe I oughta get braver about that– nothing but the resin really is dangerous– and get comfy and settle in for alot longer, drawn-out work…

k

Creating Maskworld in Blender

shot from blender, while making animation

In some ways, it’s like I’ve got 3 projects. One is the sculptural part, the body. Another is the animated part, the mind. And a third is the integration of the two– the part I know the least about. Part of my dance of accomplishing this project will involve some kind of negotiation between these three, dividing my time so that I can get all 3 of these things done…

I just got back from winter break about a week ago. The last assignment we had to turn in before leaving was one final phase of the prototype, and I was told that I ought to give a clarification of the digital/animated aspect. So I broke out Blender and started doing tutorials– and here are a few screen shots of the progress (not the final product) of those efforts– I’ve put the screenshots of the in-progress animating because I think they’re in some ways as cool as the final product 🙂 I felt rather ambitious, and accomplished, at doing this much work in 3d animation for the first time.

This here is a snap from the sequence I rendered, in which you see a mask emerge from a mirror (two important symbols in Maskworld) now it was the first time I ever tried constructing a face in blender (and the first time I ever tried so long to make a face turn out right) so there’s cracks in it… a later tutorial turned out better and I’ll post that later 🙂 I wanted the face to come out and deform, and envelop you– but my Blender skills aren’t there yet. It had a spooky resonance anyway and I love mirror surfaces in Blender…

Some playing around with the mask– often in Maskworld we will find masks half-buried in the sand, observing the sky or being the object of interest of passing objects…

This shot was just cool–

The idea of home is relevant to identity, and the simple cartoonish house stands to represent the transient nature of that anchor on which we rely for much of who/what we think we are. This is not actually a house though, if you look, but a facade, which however is treated as a house and inhabited (on the one hand, it casts a shadow, and in this shadow beings may find safety from the sunlit world– and on the other hand, on its other side is a pool in the same shape as the house, and aquatic beings dwell there– so in many aspects this object on the Maskworld landscape harbors entities which have no position or place of security elsewhere. The actual structure suggests falsity, a front which exists for the benefit of passersby, but it also offers a signal of stability, sufficient for the transient entities who require its protection, its affirmation.

Here’s the animation of the facade, as though we were walking around it in Maskworld (probably too fast, but at least you can get a rough idea)

oh, I almost forgot- the styrofoam hand…

I forgot to mention it– I also carved a hand out of styrofoam– actually before I even set out on the cardboard (a roommate of mine said it looked better in styrofoam)

A pity I didn’t document that process… but anyway you can see the finished product..

It’s hard to get this stuff perfectly smooth though… I wonder what this stuff would be like with epoxy all over it…

my computer

could be a new kind of interface 🙂

Continued train of thought… the second HAND

I started in the next day with the second hand– again starting with a flat cutout of a hand shape, then connecting a few “hoops” of cardboard around the palm and wrist (but only sparsely this time) and then started to try to exclusively use cardboard cut in that “elongated eye” shape you see here…

I focused more energy on making the palm accurate, as you can see. I started there first actually.

The palm, I think, is one of those places on the body which really turn out to be alot more complicated than you usually believe– you’re only aware of this when you’re trying to illustrate a hand in detail. Sometimes I think hands are only presumed to be familiar and normal things, because we hardly ever explore them in depth… We tend not to explore very much those things which are the nearest and most constantly present to our view.

Sometimes I forget that cardboard is flexible and bends… And very thin cardboard can actually conform to quite crazy twists and turns. Sometimes I catch myself acting as though the cardboard pieces are stiff and static and that’s the end of the story, and I have to remind myself– this bends, we don’t have to be geometric all the way here.

It was a Kaluha package– which is nice and shiny gold on one side (hard to tell in the pictures above.) Too bad, in a way, the goldness will be covered.

I admit there’s a rather compelling aesthetic to just the pure cardboard by itself, without all this talk of covering it in fiberglass and epoxies and such… Cardboard really is a great medium for sculpture in many ways: being flexible, cut-able, light, strong and plentiful (and by extension cheap/free!!) there are just a few downsides to cardboard: it’s a little bit fragile, non-weatherproof, non-impact-proof, non-stuffing-into-my-stationwagon-and-driving-over-the-grapevine-proof… You get the idea. My hopes are that fiberglassing and/or resin-covering can resolve these downfalls…

I enjoyed the smooth shapes that were coming out on this one…

I didn’t have the first hand (1.0?) around when I was starting to build this second one– which was partly on purpose and partly because I was a bit lazy to go get it… which is because these are all experiments after all 🙂 And so as a result I didn’t have the “method” (if you can really call it that) that I used to fill in certain places, available for reference with this one– and I couldn’t remember exactly what I did anyway… But that was a good thing in a way, because I had to reinvent everything…

The palm was, again, looking like a flower– but in a different way, slightly, than the last one…

Really it’s the crevices that are the biggest problem to figure out– especially that space where the thumb joins the rest of the hand, and between the fingers. Logically one would imagine that these hard corners would work just fine in cardboard– problem is, these places on hands are alot more curved and complicated than we realize. Maybe later I’ll do a hand which has its fingers all spread out as wide as I can make look ok, and then we’ll take a look at the “crevices” in question…

I’ve heard sculpting-teachers talk about sculpting here and there– and one thing I’ve heard them say is that a sculpture needs to “work” from all angles– 360-degree beauty– And this is something to be watchful of when you’re sculpting, because sometimes you start priveleging one angle above the others, focusing on that “face” of it and forgetting the rest. However I’ve started to see a direction in which a sculpture doesn’t work as a kind of *hole*– and sometimes a sculpture can have very large holes… And then a task becomes to mend these *holes*, because a sculpture is 3d so that it can give you art no matter which way you look at it.

knuckles are still a connundrum and this is the best strategy I can think of so far…

You know, the second time you do something, I think there are certain things you like better this time, and certain things you like better from the previous one. All in all, I’m not sure you can really ever do a thing “twice”– not unless it’s the kind of art that can be cut/copied and pasted 🙂 but in this kind of stuff here, each outcome is just one of many possibilities. The only thing that kindof makes it “enough” or good enough, is when its look or charm or something else, makes you not care about the other ways it could have been done, and makes improvements not matter.

Oh yeah, and you might be wondering about the 4-fingered-ness of the hand, I forgot to mention that 🙂

There’s no specific reason why, but I always imagine this character with 4 fingers. He is a cartoon after all..

An art historian once showed me a painting of a man sitting at a table, his hand on the table– and he pointed out, that it looked like 5 fingers were too many. Since that remark, I’ve every once in a while looked at the hands in art, I mean mainly painting and illustration, and kind of would notice whether 5 looked like the right number in that rendition. I think in figurative art like comics and cartoons, where the artist is given permission to be more general and even “childlike” in simplifying/altering anatomy, characters can very often get away with having 3 fingers+thumb and still looking “human” (go below that, 2 fingers+thumb, and I think they start to look like an alien or non-human– Gonzo (the alien/wierdo) for example, has 2 fingers and a thumb, but most of the other Muppets have 3 fingers+thumb… interestingly, Kermit (the main character) has 5 fingers… [Total side note; I TA’d for a class at UCSC called “Muppet Magic” this quarter, so I have alot of Muppet-thoughts in my head at this point:) ] )… It’s as though there was a subconscious admittance to the idea that you don’t really need more than 3 fingers+thumb… It also points to the fact, that hands do more than lift and hold and touch for us– they are also an identifying characteristic, signifying humanness, and like all such areas of the body, only permit up to a certain degree of “distortion.”

The thumb is a real mystery…

I was filling out the bottom part of the thumb (what’s that area called? maybe I should look up hand-anatomy for what it’s specifically called…) and the trick of rounding out that area worked rather well I thought..

You can compare above, with how I lay down strips (breaking temporarilly from that “eye” shape and going back to strips) to form the curve of the bottom of the thumb (is it called the ball of the thumb? not sure) Take another look at that underlying structure, the two glued-together shapes that went there before– they really formed a good and strong base for putting these strips on– the structure in that area is all in all quite strong which I’m glad of… And the effect turned out rather realistic…

took it into the other room to finish-- you can see hand1 in the background

still its weakest angle...

It looks very “mecha” here…

again each finger has its own “strategy”… I like the first and second fingers, the pinkie was a bit of a jab in the dark…Maybe the middle one demonstrates the best way to go about it… oh how hilarious that is in a childish kinda way…

this is also not a very strong angle, but the fact the fingers are bent helps a little…

I had to use one little piece of red, to fill in that gap I was talking about… just because it was shaped in the exact perfect way, but only with the red side up– the other side would have been upside down and wouldn’t have served the purpose… I’m a bit of a control freak even in times of allowed chaos.

now here

Once, when I was taking a sculpture class, the teacher gave us the homework to go home and create hands from clay– as realistic as possible (that’s what the teacher valued above all) and we brought our “homework” to class the next day, and laid out all these hands on a table. The teacher’s way of grading, was to pick out the ones that jumped out at her as good and bad, and point them out to the class. Well, maybe there’s no other way to go about it.

Anyways I told friends about how funny it was to see so many hands lying on a table– and most of them respond with horror and disgust… When you imagine a hand on the table, it’s usually a Halloween/B-movie kind of thought, covered in blood or something, nasty… But really, I think it’s surprising when you actually see a hand (or very non-hand stuff which looks like a hand) on a table… It’s not anywhere near as horrible as you’d think.

I have another story about hands on a table, you’ll have to go into “Mask Theater” to learn about that story…

I was pretty satisfied with this hand as well..

I plan to construct several more, hopefully before the end of this quarter, but we’ll see…

The two hands, side by side

New train of thought… the first HAND

I finished a prototype, figured out it’s gonna be Blender that helps me animate my project, and I destroyed a couple of models.

All totally normal turns of affairs… And no really unexpected events to speak of actually… And yet I still feel anxty, from time to time, that this is going to actually work at all, come together and not look like crap. So, after feeling really really anxty about the sculpture for a few days, I decided what my next course of action should be: to focus on hands, one of the hardest things to sculpt in cardboard, at least for me, and just focus on improving my technique with hands for a few days.

We’ll get to faces later, there’ll definately be a time when we need to get into faces. But let’s start with hands.

So a few nights ago I started in with HAND 1.0… As usual, I didn’t have a clue where to start, except an outline of a hand on a piece of cardboard. And that’s where I started.

Started with a flat cut-out… Started to loop strips around it, for dimensionality. I would later abandon this tunnel-type tubing for the cardboard.

The middle finger had to be bent forward because that knuckle just came out too big… I didn’t feel like re-doing it smaller 🙂

And it didn’t look bad in that pose anyway– in fact it perhaps looked a little better than just flat all the way across….

From the outset, I really liked how those seeming ligaments on the back of the hand looked.

There was this new shape which occurred to me as I was starting this– can you see what it is? No longer the elongated rectangle of strips like before, but this more organic, almost-elipse with pointed tips. I was thinking it reminded me of a “fish shape,” but I have no idea why.

…There’s this weird unexpected aesthetic that emerges sometimes…

I feel a little better about using the ever-so-toxic and bad-for-the-environment media of fiberglass and resin, by at least using recycled cardboard underneath it…

It looks almost like a gauntlet…

the fingers were really hard to figure out… I still don’t know what’s the best way. I’ve been doing each finger a different way…

I wanted to tell someone, “it already feels alive”… I wasn’t sure why that choice of words, either.

The palm was sure an interesting engineering problem.. here, I was trying to find a way to anchor and pull down on a certain place where those two flaps intersect

It’s always so funny and curious when I wind up doing things I don’t even anticipate or sometimes even fully understand. Here it is and the palm is looking more and more like a flower– Is this oversimplification finding its bearings elsewhere in nature as it plods blindly towards its goal– or has it found something forgotten or hidden in that thing it emulates?

These stripes I found useful around the edge– they reminded me of tiger stripes…

I chose to leave a few gaps, instead of further layer and layer on more cardboard to cover them– which could possibly create more interruption than a hole..

In the end, each finger had its own strategy for coming into being…

It was so interesting to see the dual organic/inorganic sculptures I could make with my own hand and this one..

The poses seem to number as many as the whole body is capable of….

It was also so interesting, to be focusing so much on something in your hands, on creating something so (hopefully) like those hands… like the hands were themselves making their own portraits, or companion in another form…

If you want to take these pics anywhere, just make sure everybody knows where they came from.

…That same friend looked at these pictures and said it’s like I’m drawing him, the Mask, into this existence… guiding him by the hands…

Happy with this excersize, I set out the next day to do it again… on the right hand…

Intermission in the pursuit of bigger/better human-dolls…

As I was pursuing the building of more and more sophisticated (or at least more full of parts that made me happy to see amongst the other chaos) there came a week when I had a meeting with a professor in my department– and she basically said she wanted to see a digital aspect to this… “You have to see if this thing is going to work,” meaning, demonstrate what it was like to look through this guy’s eyes, and figure out if that really did give the impression of wandering a landscape or… whatever. I had admitedly, its true, not been developing that side of this thing… So, I took a side-track from this project of building these larger and larger bodies and turned to the location of the digital part of this project: the head.

I needed an LCD screen, in order to project an animation from the computer on.

So I borrowed a mini-dvd player from my department. Unfortunatelly, it turns out that a 7.5″ screen with an 8″ frame is way, way larger than any head… it would surely not fit comfortably behind an ordinary mask from the store… So, I had to construct a custom-made head… which would also necessitate a custom-made mask, to hold the dvd player inside.

I started by making a little box for the dvd player to sit on (and oh this was the start of my current love-affair with hot glue) and then just started attaching strips of cardboard all around it– first a large loop over the top, then another around the side, a large oval at front… Then kinda just adding and adding, closing the gaps one by one… Trying to keep smoothness in mind…

This part was quite therapeutic actually…

…At around this point, a friend commented that it looked Bauhaus… I don’t know much about Bauhaus but that’s awesome 🙂

Seeing this big object on my desk, housing a mini-dvd player… it totally seemed like a portrait of what digital media could mean, beyond computer games and websites

The “skull” had to be as tight as possible around the dvd player, so that it was at least somewhat close to the size it will hopefully eventually be– so I kept the player in there the whole time for reference, always making sure it could be removed…

Then came the really unknown-territory part… and the strange-looking part… building the face.. or, rather, the Mask…

It was hard to know where to start with using strips of cardboard, trying to use a plastic mask as reference (this mask is about 20% larger than a typical plastic mask from a craft store)

I realize that it’s probably hard for anyone, even those who know my project and character, to follow the logic of what I’m doing. It’s just so unusual it’s hard to see what I’m working for and what these steps signify, I suppose.

If you hang in there, I hope to satisfy your curiosity and settle your bafflement abundantly 🙂

…although you may still have a long while to wait before that time 🙂

In the curvature of the mask, you can see the opportunity to peer inside, but also the question of which way its eyes look– outwards, into our world, or inwards, into another? The illustrations never fully answer this question– for while he is often portrayed visibly searching, it is sometimes vague whether he is searching for something in the world around him, or inside his head.

In the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, there is a simple trick, inverted portraits in the wall, and passers-by get the distinct impression that these are 3d faces, which are “following you around,” the eye flips so easily between directions when it isn’t given clues which direction a 3d surface points. A face can seem to be looking one way, when it is actually pointed the exact opposite, when it is inverted.

This can especially be a problem when one of these confusing figures is transposed onto 2d… Of course, I’m not suggesting that’s a big issue here– the cardboard isn’t exactly convincing enough for that 🙂

had to leave a hole for the A/V in

I almost forgot to leave the hole for the A/V in on the dvd player… I was so engrossed in laying down strips to cover…

And there we basically had it– covered enough to set up the simulation anyway (an interior space for the dvd player, which didn’t let in too much light anyway) I continued a while after this point, trying to seal all the major holes, but of course I didn’t go so far as to absolutelly seal all of them… and I tried to lay down as much consistency as possible in terms of strips being higher and lower than each other…

And now, you’ve got to know that there was of course a good reason for there to be a dvd player in there. When I wasn’t working on this object, I was discovering, and learning for the first time, the 3d modelling system Blender– which is my current one love as far as 3d modelling programs go– and after much struggle I was able to build a very simple, very basic 3d animation, basically illustrating what a person could see *in theory* through the eyes of the mask.

So here’s the rudimentary vision of what you would see through the eyes of the rudimentary object above…

I warn you, it’s very rudimentary…

don’t laugh– it took me all day to figure out how to get this to work 🙂

so you have to imagine that this is what you would see, through the eyes of that mask, on the mini dvd screen… more or less….

It’s an incredably, incredably basic version of what i’m planning. And did I mention it was rudimentary?

(you have to click the pic to view the animation)

Bigger and bigger dolls part 3

larger and larger! its posed kind of emerged by itself... but doesn

I guess I may as well refer to this trial as Alpha 3.0 since that track seems to be working. I tried new ways to make his feet look round (my inspiration for the feet, so far as I can tell, is more or less drawn from cartoons– at least, that’s the only place I’ve seen feet with this bulbousness and I always just imagine him that way.. in the illustrations, he quite often has extremely bulbous, anamorphic feet) Again, I kind of let the hands slide. If you look carefully, you’ll see they don’t look like much. His torso came out more or less uneven too, but I figured heck he’s a step towards something.

Look closely at the knees– hopefully one of these photos will let you do that– I found out that taking a more-or-less square piece of cardboard, and then cutting the end in FRINGES– before, I had been cutting in jagged V-shapes when I was trying to get a round curve… lots of uneven-ness) The fringes naturally want to fold and interlace into each other when you bend them together. It was the only way I could find to get such a round knee (I was especially happy with his right knee) and didn’t feel too obligated beyond that.

I kept putting off and putting off getting into the face… until I wound up neglecting to do it entirely. Oh well, he doesn’t really need one, does he?

Yes, his fingers are just scrolled up cardboard. I tried to fill the sockets with glue, and then with clay…

which looked pretty corny but eh.

Then, finally, I got the nerve to FIBERGLASS him… I did it late at night outside… I had fiberglass fabric, and I had cut it into strips (it didn’t dawn on me or I somehow forgot, in my excitement to get started, that fiberglass tape exists– well they didn’t have any at automart anyway) so anyways strips– and i mixed up the goo ever so carefully— and I ran out of both resin/hardener and strips before I was even halfway done. Looks like I under-estimated how large his surface actually was… or under-estimated how far the fiberglass goes. Well, I had only cut up about a 4th of what I had, so I continued a different night… Still didn’t finish. I saved it for a few weeks later.

Yes there are/were fringes that stick up… and get frozen that way– a bit poky. And yes it was uneven… Difficult to get under his arms, and his hands, again, were just a mess– Not entirely well planned. Well, I tried to get my mistakes with each go, or at least I planned to.

I was expecting to finish up the glassing on the 3rd night- but I made some kind of mistake. The other nights, the stuff was cured in 2 hours without question. But this time… It was still sticky, I don’t mean gummy, I mean just as gooey as when I first layed it down, 5 hours before… NOOOOOO!! destroyed– putrid-smelling, unsandable, un-bondo-able, un-anything-able… another failed experiment..

And what caused this small catastrophe?

Whether I was over-confident with the process or was tired or in a bad mood– or whether my mixing-bowl had some nasty ancient resin still-unhardened left in it, (which was because usually, I’d been using a measuring cup to measure out the resin, and then pouring it in a second bowl for the hardening. To my surprise, one day I discovered that the resin in the measuring cup was still fluid– and letting off a hideous odor that was nastifying my closet… and scaring my roommates a little. So I decided I’d get rid of the measuring cup by mixing the hardener directly into it… Yes, by close to the end of my process, there was a definite wierd super-rubbery goo coming up from the bottom of the measuring cup– from where the “old” resin would have been… ) so it could have been something wierd from that– or it could have been because I think I kind of- heh heh– took the hardener and went squiiiiiiirt instead of the careful measuring of 12 drops– well it could have been either of these reasons and either way I’m not doing either of them again…

The result was definitely different than the other 2 nights I did it… Any ideas what I did wrong, based on that story? I at least believe it was one or both of those things.

I finally got up the nerve and fiberglassed him...

tragic slime.. well at least you can see where it was going...

I was way annoyed…

…you can also see the brand of resin/hardener I was using… And the hideous goo slopping off it onto the wax paper (totally normal, I believe)

…I had kind-of cheated and covered the back of his head with clay before glassing– seemed like it had a much better chance of turning out smooth… And it did get smooth- I was at least happy about that. There was alot of concerns (and there still is) about how round and “organic” you can get cardboard to be. Well at least I have this crappy picture to let us know that you can– with some work– get these two very anti-round and anti-smooth things- fiberglass and cardboard, to round out.

Next time, using fiberglass TAPE (avoiding fringes) and planning to intentionally glass such a large body only one part at a time. also, stay careful with the mixing of this crap… and the storage of this crap… probably most of the tools involve have to be one-use or stored outside the house 😛

How to build a lifesized doll of strangeness… part 2

I decided on a new strategy to construct round shapes using cardboard

Two things occurred to me: one was, start with the most complicated part of the form first. In this case it was certainly to be the head. The second thing that occurred to me was, to think of what was the simplest and most immediate way to make rounded shapes using cardboard…

This second try, which I guess I’ll call alpha 2.0, was largely a coca-cola box and alot of packaging tape before I got my hands on him.. that sounds scandalous but I’ll leave it there anyway.

again not knowing where to start, I just drew out and cut the first shapes that came to mind..

Looked better than I

The little face turned out better than I expected– I had had some practice, long before, in constructing little faces out of paper by way of folding (more on that later) and he turned out quite personable actually… don’t you think?

ah, the truimph when they

After a bit of quick folding and taping, I was impressed to see the thing was able to stand on its own! Encouraging. Of course, the body has no gesture and so no appeal on that level… Although, as my roommates saw, there was a charm that was already there, even minus that believability… I’m so proud of him already.

On the face— yes, it would take fore-knowledge to know what it’s supposed to “be” as a character and entity– the specificity seems to be lost in these baby-steps of 3d-existence. Let’s hope that specificity returns as I gain capabilities in this medium.

more wrapping and taping of small pieces of cardboard brought dimensionality to his flat skeleton....

yes he does look like he has underwear of some kind! I don’t feel bad pointing out the humor in it at all…

I had to eventually secure his feet to a piece of cardboard, he started to get wobbly once there was more weight on top…

His hands are still flat– I pronounced him finished without that detail, partly because I was spent and partly because that just looked like a kettle of fish I didn’t want to get into… yet….

***

i had to satisfy my curiosity... what was this going to look like with plastic polymer on it? would it be horribly sticky or toxic? would I go blind as soon as I opened the can of the stuff? someone suggested I start by seeing what pure epoxy alone, minus fiberglass, would do

To finish up with where this experimental model went, a little while later I talked with one of my teachers about my research on polymers… I hadn’t yet bought anything and was hesitant to before doing more research. He recommended I just take some fixit epoxy and put it on a surface to see what it “does” to that surface– and he let me borrow some he had on hand (he’s such a nice guy) and so I smeared a small amount on this guy’s face– it was the part of him I most wanted to know what would happen– and some on his foot too, to see how that round surface would react. I wasn’t trying to do a good job, I just had to see what would appear and what would dissappear when I did that. And I can tell, it has a texture of its own, and at the same time it reveals the cardboard-ness of the underlying structure… This characteristic of the stuff will, I think, become both a boon and a barrier in successive trials… I was pleased to see that the stuff cures pretty close to rock-hard, smooth to the touch, cool like any plastic… these were things I’m definatelly looking for… I put the rest of the epoxy back in the can, so I wouldn’t waste his generous offer, since I knew that even with this silly job I had learned what I needed to learn from that step.

He’s still chillin out in my room in this level of semi-done-ness. He doesn’t seem to mind.

How to build a life-sized mask-headed doll… part 1

the first attempt to build the MASK

I know a few things about sculpture, and especially about building life-sized dolls. I don’t know everything for sure, but I do know a few things.

One is that you need to make a LOT of room for catastrophes. Especially if the medium, shape, scale or anything else about the thing is new. And of course this is the first time I’m ever doing anything like this.

Making room for catastrophes means making “practice runs,” or “sketches in 3d” of the thing– learning how to make something my own size stand, by making something 10% my size stand first– then building a little larger, then building a little larger, giving each successive version full permission to completelly bomb out and need to be forgotten about. I, however, never fully forget about any of the “stages” I build towards the final– and even if I do declare them bombed out and am fully convinced they are of no further use as objects in my living space and posessions of mine, I still have trouble discarding them physically. Strange it is.

So anyway I didn’t know exactly where to start in building a giant sculpture of a strange humanoid, so I started where you always start in that situation: ANYWHERE. I just started cutting out shapes that looked like him. They were on an approx 6″ scale– and I was impressed when I was able to make it stand on its own. Too bad I didn’t take a photo of him at that point.

My plan was to paper mache him, making his 2d components 3d in order to give it a foundation for an experiment in Fiberglass. However, there’s a little secret I have to tell you: I actually suck at paper mache. I tell myself the stuff is no sweat, kindergardeners use it and what can possibly go wrong anyway on such a tiny scale? (FLASHBACK: it was 1999, I was in an art class for my undergrad, and I was building my first art project for art 101- which I planned as a 4-foot-tall praying mantis. I started by jumbling stuff together, which included alot of cardboard, and then I went, as it seemed logical, after the paper mache. I smeared it all over its large proud body one night– and left to sleep. When I came back the next morning, HORRORS! the thing was bent in half with its face humiliatingly rubbing against the floor!! I ran and tried to fix it, but it was already frozen in place. CURSES! I wound up having to crack it in half and tie it back together using a broomstick or something, and papermache over that whole arrangement in a semi-pathetic attempt to hide it (oh how it never looked the same again)  I angrilly told myself several things about papermache: NOT TOO MUCH AT ONCE… and NOT EVERYWHERE AT ONCE…. and BOTTOM of the thing FIRST- NOT THE TOP!!– so anyway– I started by mache-ing his legs… support thing…) My messy little arrangement had a few things wrong with it… first of all as you can see I’m being totaly chinsy with the support structure he’s drying on. And secondly, I was a little happy with the water in the mache goo. The thing took days to dry– plenty of time for heavy parts like his feet to start drooping in wierd positions on that plastic, which I tried to counter by pulling back in the right direction– which of course just caused the paper mache to break… I tried to fix this by smearing glue over the top of it– but this kind of glue I had doesn’t evidently like to dry to a non-sticky state (curses, my dollar-store-stationary habbits…) So long story short, Alpha 1.0 is in a very sad state these days. It’s true I’ve learned a few more things about paper mache: NOT TOO MUCH WATER, and to probably not rely on a plastic sack to dry it into shape… but you know, while I appreciate learning these things about mache, I’m not going to proceed with paper mache on this project. I’ve decided there’s other avenues I want to try…

the head was masking tape, there wasn