The Ugly Uncles: Cast Plaster Sculptures!

So here's what I've been doing for the last three weeks: casting a series of sculptures!









I had never done this before, but basically I made an original out of plasticine, covered it in rubber and plaster, cut it open strategically to form a mold, and then cast these guys in plaster with that mold. Here are some little maquettes I was doing in the planning stage:



I chose this guy:


And made him bigger! Such intense concentration...



Here he is almost done; just needs some smoothing out and his legs fixed a bit.



After he is cast, he becomes the four ugly uncles pictured above! Oh, and the four uncles have a fifth sibling. This fifth uncle was my test cast, and he didn't fit in well with the others. So I took him outside and left him in a gargoyley perch downtown for pedestrians to appreciate:



Whew! Oh, and as for what happens to the plasticine after the mold is made: it tends to come out pretty trashed. I combined my leftover plasticine with somebody else to make this abomination afterwards:



Think of that when you try to sleep tonight.

Less Art...More Ridiculous: Justin Bieber and Doctor Who

Hello everyone! Well, I don't have a real art update right now, but I figured I'd post these for fun. This first thing is a little animation I did about a week and a half ago about Justin Bieber; doing this kind of cheap slide-showy animation was really fun, and I'm going to try to make another one soon. Sorry Bieber fans:

I also made this Doctor Who shirt; I saw a girl a few weeks back wearing a shirt that said "The Dark Night" and had a pretty badly drawn Joker on it. I thought the shirt was hilarious and that she had made it herself, but in the end it was just a shirt for some sorority function. The idea stuck with me, and I decided to make a really painfully bad fan shirt for one of my favorite shows, Doctor Who!



It's a little embarrassing to wear due to the sheer badness of it all, but I do it anyway. So far, nobody has said anything about it, not even my creative spelling of "Doctor."

I have a show this Friday for some sculptures I'm going to cast in plaster, so look out for that this week; take care!

Art in Boxes and More Photography!

Well, it's been a sleepless couple of weeks, but here's a brand spankin' new post! These are some box installations that I've been working on. The first is called Subvultures! and it's these two connected boxes:

The boxes are about a foot and a half tall, and they are filled with stuff that I drew, then digitally colored and printed. There are people jumping from one box to the next; people from each box seem to want to get into the opposite box. If you're curious, the text above the box on the left is Japanese for "the most beautiful butterfly of all is found in the cocoon of your heart," and the text for the box on the right is Latin for "Ah, human cares! Ah, how much futility in the world!" This is one of those projects that I wish I had better pictures of, but here are some closeups nonetheless:

At some point I'll try to take better pictures; you can't see any detail in these, arg! Here's my second box project, which functions as kind of a small cabinet, I suppose:

When you open the clasp at the top of his head, it swings open to reveal what's inside:

Aaaaand finally, something that's nice and easy to translate into a digital format because it's flat! Here's some more 35mm photography (some of which has been painted on, bleached, had the negative scratched, etc.):













Thanks so much to models Lauren, Kathryn, Eric, and Ana! Well, now that all of that is over, look forward to about a solid month of rubber sculptures. Yes, really. Moldmaking and casting, I am pumped!

Prints, Giveaway Boxes, etc!

Happy Tuesday, all; here's what I've been up to! I made 20 prints with digital photos I took combined with screenprinting; here are three of them:

In other news, last night I put up this installation of about 40 boxes. This was an exquisite corpse-esque collaboration between two other people and me; we took 40 of these little cardboard boxes, printed out a bunch of stuff, painted, drew on them, and passed them between the three of us until they were suitably worked over. Then we hung them from the ceiling and decorated a big pair of hedge clippers to hang with them so that people could cut down a box and keep it. I think this might be something that you kind of have to see in person, but I tried to get a couple of pictures anyway:



















I passed by it later today and there were only four boxes left, so I guess people were into the idea! Speaking of people taking art (although not with permission this time), if you want to see my grand television debut, you can do so here. Wooo!

I've also been playing around with Illustrator for my next project, and although I'm having a great time using it, I still have a LOT to learn. Here are some sneak previews:




What does it all mean? In a couple of weeks, hopefully it will all make sense! I feel as though this post has been a lot of stuff that doesn't really look like the kind of thing I'd usually make, but there you are. I sort of mentioned in the last post, but I've been thinking lately about including more than just finished art related things on this blog (more videos, sketches, little comics, etc.) Still up in the air about that. Stay tuned!

Magnets, Prints, Photographs, and...a Video Blog?!

Hey gang!
First of all, I recently had the awesome opportunity to screenprint these posters designed by artist Joshua Ray Stephens for the AUX 4 experimental arts festival here in Athens, GA:




So other than that, for one of my classes, I was asked to make magnets with a "springtime" theme. Maybe I'm just jaded, but I thought that was a little cheesy, so I got kind of "creative" with my springy magnets. Here's Spring, but why is there a knife in her mouth?

Because she killed Winter:

This next on was my roommate's (brilliant) idea:




And this quaint little Easter scene was mine:



Here are a couple more 35mm photographs! First, the always-unnerving Patrick:



Here's my awesome dad, working in his woodshop:



This is a photograph taken by photographer Diane Arbus:



And here's my copycat version (with aforementioned awesome roommate Lauren):



And for the last photo, a self portrait. Embarrassing. Thanks Kathryn for helping me on this one!



But what's even more embarrassing than a self portrait? A video blog. Yep, I've thought for a long time that making a vlog would be fun, if not pretty self-indulgent. So I'm going to try and give it a shot. Nothing deep, just a kind of anecdotal diary-type thing. Anyway, here's the first one:

Squid vs. Ship Mini Installation

Hello everyone!
So this project is based on the idea shown in this blog, the idea of making an installation in a tiny gallery space. I really encourage you to check the stuff out there; I love the idea of a tiny installation, and building this was super fun! I made my own box out of foamcore and filled it with stuff I had printed with an inkjet printer and screenprinted:



It's difficult to tell in the photo, but the space actually goes quite far back. And what are those four switches at the front for? They control the lightning, the most fun of the whole project! Here's a video in total darkness of my friend Patrick demonstrating how you can make your own lightning (and adding his own sound effects.)



I really enjoyed putting circuitry into this thing, so look out for more electronic things in the future! Here's one more 35mm photograph of my lovely friend Eric to rap up the post:

My First Attempt at Coloring in Photoshop

Yep, pretty self explanatory title. This is just a quick late night post; this is what I did today! I scanned in four drawings (three of each different person and one of the pig and chicken), and combined and colored them in photoshop. This is the first time I've tried this, and it took forever!

Click the picture to see it in a larger size!