Art I Made in Q4 of 2019

There were a few weeks of unemployment in there during which I made a lot of art. One thing I learned is that I don’t really want to spend 10 hours executing on a construction project anyone could do. I want to spend 10 hours throwing together unlikely ideas in a way that no one else would want to do. This means I am going to keep making small art with high density of content. I think that’s fine, but throwing hours at a huge straight-forward project is a much better way to make friends.

More Dinosaur Building

This sign came out pretty well, despite being incredibly simple. It looked best on this palm tree.

I’d never done this body style before, but it’s quite nice. Also a good way to use up this random flooring that was sitting in the shed of my house!

This kind of photo is hard to parse, but this is 3 dinos in a sandbox. At a Mini Maker Faire we had kids and parents making these things too! Quite fun. Slightly dangerous.

I copied this idea from a participant at Something Else and it’s great. Here, I’m trying it with kids. Kids are the worst. They just destroy each other’s art and most of them are making absolute crap.

Here’s the same project at SF Decompression, where you have wasted burners fucking around till 2am. Much better results than the kids. Even though this would be better if the burners were less destructive.

Pretty chaotic. Next time, I’d run this at a daytime event with adults!

Right, we also built a bunch of dinos at this other event. This is an early photo, I think. We eventually got about 5 dinosaurs built here. They were ok.

A Few One Offs

This was just so easy. I still like it.

I helped Kate out with this star design in the back. It was all figuring out geometry and tiles and angles. Interesting because I got it all set up digitally, but ultimately she didn’t use digital tools to make this almost at all! Looks great though.

An experiment! I secured a cardboard trash bin to the ground on my block to see if this might decrease the littering! It did not. I now believe most of our litter actually blows in from around the neighborhood. Also there aren’t enough public trash cans, but this one filled very slowly mostly from people living in their vehicles at this corner. I ran this about 2 months.

Biltmore Southern

So we made a kind of train station.

Here is the locomotive I made. It is cute. In retrospect, it would have been easier to build this a bit larger. I kept it small so it could enter rooms and elevators in the hotel, but that was really a waste of effort. It mostly looks cool sitting there. When someone piloted it, this mostly blocked the entire hallway. If it’s just a sculpture, then it should have been longer.

Great construction technique: cardboard over wood frame.

I did a few special pieces. The cattle catcher (“pilot”) was fairly time intensive and barely mattered. Next time I would make it weak and just replace it when it died. Another important lesson here was to test my tape better! I figured Gorilla would have the power I needed, but it was pretty weak on the painted cardboard. Also the amount of hot glue needed at this scale is staggering. I should have brought more sticks and counted on it less. Screws are really the best fastener for this project.

The control panel. I really liked this, but it was inside the train so didn’t get much action. Now it lives over the door of my room and I can crank up the harissa any day.

The first model! Very cute and very encouraging, but the scale is quite different. Honestly, the model is much better than the final product because it has better proportions and the hot glue is more effective at this scale. This has no wood frame, either, which is simpler. I threw this together based on some printed images from the internet is under two hours.

Ava made us this very nice ticket booth at the last minute. It had a working telegraph in it.

Oh right, I also made these Biltmore Southern postcards! I got real stamps for them and we mailed about a dozen in the end. This project involved learning how to make postcards! A great ability. I printed png files online then printed on the back with my home monochrome laser printer. This requires hiding the printshops metadata on the back (timestamp etc). I did that with the black train on the back (visible lower left). This also gives the participant less space to fill with their rambling.

I made a bunch. Also we sharpied trains onto old photos and ran those too.

Gosh, I also did a bonus project off of this one that was simply an 8'x8' piece of artificial turf, a sign, and this bench. Instant park. This bench design is really great because it is so simple and cheap. 3 6' 1x4s. The bases are all 4 12" 2x4s in a square. Then there are some extra chunks of 2x4 at the top of the bases. I think this takes about 15m to build or strike and is strong and cute enough.

Zoo Signs

Basically the Biltmore Southern project was done with a team and none of them had as much to contribute as me, so I also did this even bigger project on the side and occasionally pretended it was sponsored by Biltmore Southern.

So you know those weird signs you see in regular life that almost make no sense?

I did wacko versions.

This sign is about a creature that another group put together. They had about 4 of them. I printed this sign out real big and put it in the middle of everything, so it was a nice collaboration.

These are the icons from MUNI in SF. It turns out they are not very hard to recreate as vectors.

There were about 20 of these in the end.

There were a lot of signs in the end. Foamcore backing. All prints tabloid size, cut to cover boards.

Oh, I even made signs about the train company! And some things for the station, such as a donor plaque, map, schedule, large print of a painting of the Golden Spike getting driven in.

And then I Had a Job

Seriously, though, I finished all the above a week before starting a job, then stopped making art and started putting in hours! I did turn out one last solid project before the year was over.

For New Year’s Eve, a “Next Year Generator” in a briefcase. Different people messed around with it a bit, but this basically took 10 hours and got like 30 minutes of play, so not a good ratio.

In situ.