A most beautiful city

Here's a city in the air I am calling Boufant City. It's for the same project as the Fish Ship and it's made the same way. See if you can find the shampoo bottles and medicine jars, toy parts and a Senior Frogs novelty beer swilling bugle shaped plastic cup vase thing.

new ship pics

Here's a few new pics of Mark and I working on the fish ship. My kids got into the act and helped us paint some of the under coats.

(scroll down to see the original ship post)

Benefit for Djangos education

This here's a marker and transfer study for a school benefit. I used brush pens, dry transfer texture, zyline xerox transfer, and AD and Prisma color markers.



Happy New Year

Well We're not really done yet actually. My friend Marc Ceccarelli and I are working on a spaceship that looks like a fish made of copper. It's for a project of mine. I started this particular project long, long ago. But I'm still at it... like a dog with a bone.

These are a couple of sketches we started with. I did this first one back in the day. It's been hanging on my walls for almost a decade by now.



A little while later I did this one.


Neither of these was ever meant to be a definitive design. Because of the nature of the way I build stuff I realized that the final result was going to be determined as we went along.

We started with a spinal collumn made of nested widths of PVC pipe. the sections are bolted together.



Then we inserted 1/2inch thick wooden dowel rods into the bottom of the fish/ship spinal collumn. This whole thing is going to be a glorified stick puppet. I don't have photos of this part though sorry.

After that we built ribbs for the width of the body out of 1/2 inch thick foam core

you can see that we have already started to glue the engine shapes onto the tail there. Yup those are cups were glueing on there. Thats how we're building this one too glueing trash together!


Here's a better view of the "engines". We've also glued more bits of stuff on as you can see. That there's Marc.


Then we glued squares cut out of cereal boxes and light bulb packaging over the remaining ribbed sections.


Once the building is done we applied a base coat of flat black spray paint.

This helps start to knit all the bits you've glued together visually.

Here's the first layer of copper color over the black.



Now I know I'm skipping over a lot of stuff here but I just want to cut to the quick here. this is the state we got to by the end of this christmas break.


Here's a close up of the paint job on the front of the ship.

first the left side


then the right

and here's the right side before the paint job...


can you find the top of the apple juice bottle?

Now even at this stage the painting here is still undercoats. after this we'll put whatever details or decals we want on the ship. then we still have a level of "weathering" for the whole ship to go through...

but all that's for next time.