Muffin

Ok this one was a lot of fun, mainly because of the high levels of spontaneity.  I went on a weekend trip with Kaitlin, my girlfriend, and we stayed a t ahotel that has a free breakfast service (lush... I know).  So I had gotten this blueberry muffin and decided to save it for the road and put it in my glove box as we drove back home, about a 4 hour drive for this vacation.

     Well about 2 weeks go by and I am driving to class one day and open the glove box for whatever reason and see the muffin still sitting there.  My first thought is "Daaaang, I have to throw that away", my second is "Wow this muffin has gotten really hard", and my third thought was "I could totally make a mould of this!"

     So I take the muffin back inside my house and begin to cast.  The first cast was of some left over plastic I had, then i did a series of Foam casts.  The foam I used was 10lb. and expanded about 10 times.  I decided to go with the foam because I had never used it before and had a lot of free time to screw it up and learn how to use it properly (the same reason I do most things).

Mixing up liquid plastic.

Plastic muffin cast.

I took a dinner break and made some amazing tacos that night and apparently took a photo.

Half painted muffin.

Glamour shot!

Then the foam casts.

Then finally both finished painted muffins

The Foam one is on the left, the Plastic one on the right.
thanks for dealing with this ridiculously long blog post!

Knife mould

This was my first major mould.  I get my materials from Askew Taylor in downtown Raleigh NC.  They have a great selection of almost anything ay artist would ever need.

The mould is a silicone rubber compound.  The sides of the mould are really rough because I didn't use enough mould release, so the silicone fused together and had to be ripped apart. 

These pieces of wood were used to hold the sides together and the clamps were used to clamp the wood together.  The mould was filled with a liquid plastic and allowed to harden for the appropriate amount of time.

The mould worked a lot better for just the handles.  As you can see the blades of the knives got a lot of air bubbles trapped in them from the design of the mould and the plastic proved so thin that it easily broke off.  Lesson learned, a harder plastic is needed to cast knife blades!

All the white is the cast and the black is the original.

Air cannon

This is a project that still isn't technicaly completed.
I had an idea to build an air cannon like one youd find at many effects shops, only smaller.  I found a 5 gal 135 psi tank and a sprinkler valve and thought these would work fine.

I even made a nifty remote to flip the valve

But when I finished all the soldering, filled it with my compressor to very low psi (about 5), plugged it in and flipped the switch, it just acted as a VERY loud airhorn.  So that ones back on the drawing board.  The soldering connections were very poor due to a faulty soldering iron (not my soldering skills of course ; )) and the value definitely wasn't opening fully and instantly.

Blood work

These are a few examples of my blood work.

This is a recipe I found and altered a bit to make it more viscous.

This is the pump I use.  200 or so pumps and that canister is ready to blow.

The hose is filled with blood and the end of the hose capped with some foam rubber bits.

Then its Kaboom!

Plastic Models

Here are just a few models I have made over the years.  Some of these I did in Highschool in 2005 and 2006.

This is a motorcycle I made 5 years ago. It's from one of those kits. I forget which one...

This is a model of a P 51-B Mustang.  It is a very small model.  2 incehs in height.

This little plane can fit easily in the palm of your hand.

This next model is a suit of armor.  It's about 6.5 inches tall

The final model is a WW2 tank.  I had an idea to build a giant 4ft by 5ft scale scene of a war torn town in Germany with a bunch of tanks and buildings, but after this tank, that idea flopped.  It will most likely be revived in the coming years!

Pelvis

This one's a bit more interesting...

        I had a CT scan done of my abdomen a year ago and received a cd from the doctor full of images of, well... my guts.  The CT scan took 81 cross section images of my abdomen and then a full body scan.  The bone was clearly white and visible in each image.  I printed out each cross section image and determined how much distance was in between each image using the number of slices and the distance the scanning took place.  The result was about half a centimeter.
        Then I measured the waist size on the print outs (which were smaller than actual size) and measured my actual waist size at the corresponding position.  I found a scaling factor and used that factor to find out how thick each bone slice would have to be to reproduce a correctly proportioned miniature pelvis. It turns out the slices were 2 mm, exactly the thickness of my matte board I used for many projects.  SO I used that to build a miniature version of my own pelvis.
          I glued each of the 81 images to piece of matte board and cut out the bone section and glued them together layer by layer using the images to help me guide the positioning. 

THE RESULTS:

       

The full model is about 3 inches tall and can fit in the palm of your hand.  This was an entire summer project.  Created Summer of 2009.  It now has a home on a bookshelf in my apartment.

Miniature UFO's

These were done in a day for the same 30 second film project.  Quickly thrown together with foam and paper clay. Finished with silver acrylic paint.  A string of fishing line was run through the middle to hang them.

The idea was to make a simple 1950's style UFO.  Simple color and an instanly recognizable shape.