Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

What with all the rain today a few more projects were wrapped up — although I didn’t do the jewelry casting I’d hoped to do because I misplaced some of my silicone putty. Anyway, let me get right to it and start with pictures of the second in my “leftovers” collection of three eyed fellows. I embarrassed myself having to paint this guy twice because instead of spraying him with clear glaze I accidentally hit him with gold spray paint, ack!!! But it still turned out fun. You can see number three (unpainted) in the background, with a removable snake draped over his/its shoulders.

All the pictures in this entry can be clicked to zoom big.

I can’t take credit for the next two entirely, because Nefarioius is back to making Tippy Pig characters and created these two, a double-headed siamese pig connected at the butt (I will leave off the “anatomically correct” hole that she put in the middle from the photo set), and a girl wearing a coconut bra! The siamese pig is wearing gold metallic body paint, and both of them were painted by me under art direction from Nefarious with the exception of the metallic which she cast a vehement vote against but I think was at least partially sold on it by the end.

Finally, here is where I’m at with the skull “boxes”, which are clay webs/lattice (scaffolding?) laid into skull molds and then cut and hinged. The larger skull, that’s got the split lid, also has magnets in the lid to hold it closed. The fittings are brass but right now they’re painted. I may strip that paint but I’m not sure yet. It was a headache getting them fitting perfectly but after the first one I had learned a lot and it’s much faster now. That said, I don’t really have an end vector or purpose for these so I’m kind of stalled and have just put them on my shelf as a perhaps perpetually “almost finished” project crash.

I do like how they look though. I’m not sure what I’m doing next other than the little things I’ve mentioned. I’m really feeling very down about my illness and the ineffectiveness of my treatment options so I am doing my best to stay distracted. So I’m thinking about a chess set in my cartoony sculpture style featuring the Hindu pantheon, as well as a double-scale fully functional sub machine-gun made out of chocolate. Or something. I wonder if that would be legal, making a 100% accurate and complete replica weapon out of chocolate (or even plastic), what with Canada’s oddly draconian replica gun laws. It can be hard to get filming permits for replica guns, so I remember laughing once watching some “true crime” show and seeing that the bad guys were using broomsticks with coffee cans duct taped to them, painted black, as stand-ins for Tommy guns. The shots were fast so I doubt many people noticed, but for those that did, hilarious.

I got a bit too ambitious this weekend and spent two days in a row with extended time at the park including a long hike through the hills in addition to baseball practice and sword fighting a la Nerf. It was fun at the time but I’m still in a lot of pain from it and hope that I am healed by the next weekend. It doesn’t help that in my home time I did a lot of work with the Dremel that has left me with somewhat crippled hands and forearms. I haven’t scheduled my EKG yet but at times like this a morbid part of me hopes that the tests show something horribly and terminally wrong with my heart, simply to put a scheduled “end” on the calender to put me out of my misery… So I try and keep enough fun — and enough rest — to still keep things enjoyable even though pain is the primary sensation mated with a slow grind to paraplegia.

Just to be clear I have been successful so far!

I have a nice little collection of little left-over silly ghosties sitting here. As I mentioned before, I make these out of the clay bits that I have as remainders from bigger things. Once the A+B halves are mixed, the clay has to be used, so these little fellows get created with any I can’t use on the main task. I enjoy them sometimes more than the primary object… Go ahead and click to zoom in.

The main thing that I’ve been working on as said primary object is a full scale skull box in sort of a framework design, with lots of holes in it. It’s been a real headache getting the fit of the hinged sections perfect, but I’ve finally got it. Now it’s just a matter of doing the finishing work, and I’m still undecided on the specifics.

Oh, and also in the good news department, we snagged a pile of bikes and a wheelchair from next to the garbage bin at our studio… People are always throwing out interesting things. Maybe we’ll cut them up and re-weld them into some fun mutant bikes.

Yay free bikes!

Other than that, enjoying tonight’s reality TV and trying to rest as much as I can while still having fun.

My desk is always covered with a mixed pile of in-progress tiny projects. The reason for this is that when I’m making something with Apoxie clay, which needs to be used within an hour because it hardens so qiuckly (with a full rock-hard cure in a day), I always have a bit left over and I have to choose between wasting it (and at over $10 a pound I’m not going to do that) and coming up with something immediately. The bowl was made with a mix of left overs: first I made a hard mold on a bunch of Nefarious’s dolls’ faces, and once they were hard I used those molds to make a copied face. Then I turned it into a container by blending into a tiny clay container shell, hanging it upside down to harden which gave me the organic or fabric sort of appearance. On the two final left-overs cycles I flipped it over and made tripod legs so it would stand nicely, and then squished some clay on the inside of the bowl so as to make it smooth without crevices from the folded shape.

Of course the final stage was to sand it so it wouldn’t be covered in bumps and finger prints and all that. Wrapping up the finishing I painted it (which was so much simpler because of the final smooth-out application of clay). If you want to see some more pictures, there are a bunch of others on the next page. Oh, and as expected, I spent most of the day comatose, but I still managed to achieve small successes that I’ll post another time.

(Continued)