May 1, 2011

Clearing Out

The packing is going well. My happy hobby desk that I built a few years ago is now gone to a new home:

Like most of my stuff, it was hard to let go of it. I put a lot of time and effort into building it, but I just don't know if I'll have the space for it out in New Mexico. So, it's gone to a friend locally who will put it to good use and appreciate it. That's all I can ask for.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:48 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | hobbies | Stumble

February 5, 2011

610

Well, because I get going on something and can't really let go of it, I decided to see if all of my Fisher Price Little People would fit onto my big-ass drawing table. There are a handful of peoples still downstairs in the basement - like the orange scuba-diver dude and the ones I customized into Leia, Han, Luke, Ben, Chewie and Vader. And the ones I made into the Village People who stand in front of the Firehouse from the old Village playset. And probably a few strays I'd forgotten to bring up with the others.

Anyhow, click through for a larger image....

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:01 AM | Comments (1) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | hobbies | Stumble

November 28, 2010

A Little Overboard

I get these wild hairs from time to time. Something just strikes my fancy, and on a whim, I have suddenly committed myself to a huge project. Last year, it was making a Sculpey piece for everyone in our department. This year it was another Sculpey project ... but a little bit different.

I watched a few friends on Twitter conversing with someone who sounded intriguing. So I followed her. She was having a rough year. Her body was attacking several organs and things were looking serious. After several surgeries and more tests than you could shake a stick at, she finally had a diagnosis of Lupus, something I've rather feared for most of my life. (I've been tested for it from time to time and had doctors bandy the word around since I was in high school.) Through it all, her kids seemed so sweet and loving.

So one day, she's tweeting about the kids playing their made up game of Plants Vs. Zombies in the backyard and she's just basking in their imagination, ingenuity and sense of fun. I mean, Plants Vs. Zombies is an iPhone game. Kind of a strategy game somewhere between board game and video game. And they are making up their own version to play in the backyard. Later on, she tweets that her two kids had asked Santa for Plants Vs. Zombies toys. I'm sure that PopCap is planning on making some at some point, given how wildly popular the game is ... but as of mid October when she tweeted that, there was nothing.

This sounded like an excellent Sculpey project to me. Two sweet kids. Imaginative. Hard year. Yep, just the kind of project I like.

I looked around the web for some screen shots, since I'd never played the game. Found out what their favourite characters were ... and went to work.

And ... umm ... I went a little bit overboard.

I kinda built them a board game version (they'll have to make up their own rules, though).

The full project isn't quite done - I'm waiting to get something back from the printer, but you'll get the general idea from these pictures:

An overview of the whole - the box is just a mockup, printed in tiles (that's the piece I'm waiting to get back from the printer):

And then there are the watermelon-catapult things - these are apparently the kids' favourite plants:

Then there's an angry "Wallnut" and a pair of zombies that are only loosely based on the game. As much as I love working in Sculpey the stuff is amazingly soft once you start working with it. Which means every time you touch it the slightest bit, you affect the sculpture. And if I've mixed colours to get a specific hue, I can guarantee the stuff is so soft, I'll never be able to get my finger prints off of it completely:

Then a couple more zombies which are more directly based on the game:

Then there's the peashooters:

Then there's the snowpea shooter and a trio of mushrooms:

And finally, a quartet of sunflowers to round everything off:

And because I can't leave well enough alone, I ordered some custom cut foam and built a box for the whole thing. Sculpey is fairly sturdy if you don't drop it on a hard surface, but why not stress that this is a little fragile?

And then a final image - this will wrap the box lid and make it look like a board game:

I should say a few things:
One, I respect copyright. This is a one-off art piece made specifically for these kids and I made it clear on the box that Plants Vs. Zombies is PopCap's baby.
Two, I won't make another one.
Three, I've accepted no money for it. I did this on a whim for some kids who needed an extra-bright spot in their lives this holiday season. That's it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:25 PM | Comments (14) | Design | Sketches | hobbies | Stumble

March 9, 2010

My First Munny

So, there are these things called Munnys which are just vinyl "shapes" that you can buy and decorate yourself. Or, if you're more into collecting than doing it yourself, you can collect various artists' renditions of Munnys. (Or Dunnys or any of the other critters they make.)

There's a huge Flickr group of customized Munnys if you want to click through. But here is a regular white Munny ready for customizing:

So I decided it was time to try my first foray into the fine art of Munny-making. My first one is quite simple, but something that was quite meaningful to me. I still have a larger white one to decorate as well as a large glow-in-the-dark one. I'll get more creative with those, I'm sure. I'd like to do some sculpting on one of them, at the very least.

This one is based on a Sunface Kachina doll. We lived in Albuquerque for all of three months when I was three years old, but I was fascinated by the culture then and remain so. The face is a typical Sunface - eagle feathers bordering and the red and yellow quarters. The face is sometimes white, sometimes turquoise. On this Munny, the eagle feathers are white leather. A leather loincloth and belt have also been glued on. I've contemplated doing a kind of "sandpainting" design on the back of the head ... that seems to be a Munny tradition of sorts to do an elaborate paint job on the head ... but in the end, I think I prefer the simplicity of this design as it is. Maybe I'll do another Pueblo/Hopi/Navajo-area-inspired design later on.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:15 AM | Comments (1) | Design | Sketches | hobbies | Stumble

May 15, 2009

Fisher Price Pueblo

I've been fascinated by the southwestern "style" ever since I can remember. And, of course, I've also been fascinated (some might say obsessed, actually) with the old style Fisher Price Little People. So for years when looking at the Little People Village, I thought, I have GOT to make a pueblo village out of one of those.

This is a bit photo-intensive, so I'm only including one photo here on the main page ... if you're interested in seeing more photos and how I made the thing, please click the read more link.

Here's a couple of shots of what I started out with:

Building a pueblo out of that was going to take some serious remodeling. I started out with a village that had been played with pretty hard ... the firehouse and the second story roofs were cracked, doors were missing and this was generally a piece that had seen hard times. So, I got out my trusty Dremel and begin sawing/melting off the pieces that I didn't need.

This section of the village had once been the fire station. I took the garage door off, and completely took the roof off as well. Then, I used sheets of polystyrene plastic to re-create the front wall and the roof to that room. I also used Dremeled off the slanty roof on the second story and cut a notch out of one ceiling/floor to accommodate a ladder (which, of course, I couldn't find when I was snapping photos). The graphics you see on the inside of the rooms of this home were all original graphics I did in Photoshop and Fireworks. I tried to keep to the simple style used in other Fisher Price toys and was pretty pleased with the overall effect.

View from the front of this building:

Every kid I knew who had this village set absolutely adored the nifty bridge that came with it, so I was determined to fit this into the theme. Naturally, it became a rock formation that bridges the home section of the playset to the "shopping district." Here you can see a little girl crossing over to the restaurant. Through the arch you can see the jeep/truck thing I attempted to make. About the only thing that I still like on that particular part of this project is that the headlights were made out of glow-in-the-dark Sculpey.

Now, the second half of the project was particularly fun and time consuming. Here, I added the logs sticking out of the "roof" and again I had to level out the roof of the second floor. You'll also note that the stores are Leslie's Diner ... Marmon Trading Post ... Silko Filling Station. This is after one of my favourite authors, Leslie Marmon Silko.

Here's a long shot from the back side ... look in the garage ... that car was completely sculpted from scratch in Sculpey. Click the picture to get a bigger version ... I was rather proud of that car ... turned out much better than the jeep thing.

The inside of the trading post ... here you can see the backside of the little people I sculpted with a native blanket wrapped around him.

And finally, the inside of the diner:

I sculpted all of the people as well ... trying to replicate the older wooden little people that I'd had as a kid, but still using Sculpey to create them. I also wanted a slightly darker tone than the pink wash that was usually used over the light coloured wood on the little people ... mixed results there. Their tone is definitely darker, but not quite what I had hoped for. The faces are drawn on with a fine point Sharpie marker.

I used Celluclay to create the adobe effect ... it's essentially a craft papier-mache product ... with mixed results. In many places it simply pulled away from the plastic as it dried ... worse, in several places it actually cracked. I've gone back with superglue and tried to re-attach the Celluclay where I can ... but I've also found that as this project has "cured" over the last two years or so, it's cracked more and new spots have begun pulling away. I fear I'll probably need to repair it periodically.

Also, I printed the graphics on a inkjet sticker pages ... unfortunately, those stickers don't stick to textured spraypaint very well! Again, I've gone back with Superglue and tried to tack down those stickers.

I used two colours of fleck paint to create the sandstone and the red sandstone looks of the two buildings. It took an entire can of each colour to completely overrun the original yellow and red buildings!

One last shot of the project:

The little boy (over to the far right, inside the house) turned out to be one of my favourite parts of this project. He, Leslie (the woman inside the diner) and the man wearing the draped blanket all turned out pretty well.

One of these days, I'm going to sell this one off and build myself another one ... I learned so much doing this one ... I can already think of several improvements I'd like to make on it.

Thanks for sticking around for all the pictures and geeky descriptions!

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:27 PM | Comments (12) | hobbies | Stumble

May 7, 2009

Ba Dum Dum Cha

I can recall overhearing my mother give her mother two edicts regarding me - no basketball hoop to put up over our garage (and yet, Grandma bought me a basketball hoop one summer for being good - and it languished in their garage because Mom wouldn't let me take it home & Grandpa wouldn't put it up at their house either) - and no drums.

Of course, Grandma bought me a kiddie drum when I was 6 or so. I ignored every other present and instantly ripped it out of the box and began beating away. I would disappear into my room - or our converted garage playroom - and wail away to my heart's content. As I left elementary school, we were given the opportunity to join the junior high band and the director came to school to give us some aptitude tests. I wanted to either play drums or saxophone. Can you guess how that went?

Finally in high school, I bought a used snare drum and would turn my stereo up ridiculously high and play along when no one else was home. Eventually, frustrated by the lack of a complete set, I sold it off. Since then, it's been an endless stream of table drumming, lap slapping and the odd hand drum here and there. I bought Wii Music because it had a drum kit in it and I thought that would be a cheap way to explore having a whole kit. Nope. Couldn't stand the way it worked. (Anyone wanna buy it?)

Next, I thought I'd try Wii Rock Band Special Edition. This at least came with a kit of four drum pads and a pedal for the bass.

Meh. I really don't like the way the kit sounds. Any of their programmed kits. (Anyone wanna ... oh hell, I need to box it up for eBay, don't I?)

The next thing I discovered in the last week or so is the cajon. Now this is a freaking cool box drum. It's all wood and you sit on it to play it. (Seriously, click through the link to a picture and description - and you can choose to watch the video if you're in a place where you can do that. It's pretty freaking awesome.) Our choir director's other half brought her new cajon to choir the other day so I could mess with it. The sounds ... wow. The thing is awesome.

But to get the tones I like the best, you have to strike pretty loudly which means I would never be able to play with it - my other half would shoot me provided her migraines didn't leap out of her skull and kill us both. I toyed with getting the bongo sized cajon, but I don't really like the higher tones, so I figured that was out as well.

Instead, I trolled through Amazon just to see what was out there. And I discovered the drum kit that I really want. Here's a YouTube demo. This sucker is the ultimate in hand drums. And from what I can tell via the YouTube, the deeper tone is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Plus, I could change the sound for different kinds of playing.

Best of all, this can be played much more quietly than the cajon. Don't get me wrong, I still think the cajon is incredible. When I'm filthy rich and build my dream house with the big-ass sound-proof music room, I'll definitely get a cajon to play as well. But for now, I should probably stay more reasonable ... :)

Seriously, anyone interested in buying my Wii Rock Band? I think I played it twice. Guitar, mic - everything except the drum kit is unused .... Hey, I gotta fund the purchase of the next drum somehow!

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:14 AM | Comments (1) | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | hobbies | Stumble