Faux Tesla Coil Project Complete-Pictuires and Commentary

The found object.

My Faux Tesla Coil project has been completed.  I am really excited to see all the components I've been working on put in their places.  I wish I was able to get a better picture of the diorama than I am posting.  The only place I have to put the diorama to photograph it is on my work table.  I don't have enough room to step back and get a good focal point.  I end up being either too close to it for the long range lens or too far away for the shorter range lens.  I hope the shot of the full diorama will give you the idea of the piece while the close ups will give you the detail. 

Regular readers may remember that this project started as a "found object" experiment.  I challenged myself to find something at the thrift store and turn it into a piece of art.  What I found was a decorative metal stand.  Its origional purpose is unknown.  Something hung from it, but I could not tell what it might have been.  When I saw it, the metal spheres on the top of the stand reminded me of the spheres of a Tesla Coil.  That was the start of the project.  What came afterwards was a mixture of research, inspiration and imagination.

For inspiration, I looked through a book of vintage Halloween images. I remembered a postcard from the late 1930's that had caught my eye.  It was a picture of a cat whose fur was all puffed up.  The card used electrical bolts to represent the static electricity.  Since a Tesla Coil is all about electricity, it seemed to fit in with my theme. I decided that the cat and electrtical bolts needed to be a part of the piece.  Rather than making the cat look like the card, I decided that the bolt would strike near the cat giving it a scare.  If you have ever seen a Tesla Coil in action, you know that this idea fits in nicely.  Other Halloween images also played a part in developing this piece.  Halloween images of anthropomorphic vegetables were also popular during this time period.  I chose to use a pumpkin figure rather than a human figure not only because it fit in with visual themes from the time period, but because the other-worldly appearance of a Tesla Coil seemed to fit in with something not quite human.  Besides, the whole mad scientist thing has been done.

I researched how to build a Tesla Coil.  Although the Tesla Coil in this project is only an artistic representation, I wanted to have a basic idea of how to build one and how they worked.  Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower was another imspiration for this piece. Tesla built a huge tower with a large sphere on top (four feet in diameter). It is an historical piece of information that many people haven't heard of before. I felt it needed to be represented in the diorama, even though there is only a passing resemblence.  I also considered adding a second figure and a Faraday Cage to the diorama,  but I'm not sure that many people would know what it was.  (A case of "Never mind, it's science.) However, in such a small space, it was just too crowded to include it.  It was a geek versus art dilemma. 

My other area of research was historical research of the time period in which the Halloween card was made.  Intuition told me that there was a story behind this card and that I would find it if I took the time to look for it.  I found that it was a time in which electricity was in two out of three urban homes, but that commercial electricity was just coming to rural areas.  The Rural Electrification Project was starting to help bring electricity to remote areas.  Electricity was very much in everyone's mind and was a topic of conversation.  I believe that this event was the inspiraton for the Halloween card.  I also learned one other historical fact that made its way into the diorama.  This was the end of the vaudeville era.  Motion pictures, powered by electricity, were the entertainment of choice.  The impact on traveling shows was tremendous.  Although many shows were limping along for a while, the handwriting was on the wall for this type of entertainment. 

The research helped me to imagine a scenario for my diorama.  I envisioned a traveling show that was trying to find a way to keep going for a while.  I imagined that bringing an electrical show to areas that did not have electricity would have been exciting and drawn crowds.  Although the Tesla Coil had been invented had been invented almost fifty years before, it most likely would been a curiosity for people who did not have electricity.  A Tesla Coil show is still a spectacular event today.

I also had to imagine how a show might have brought in electricity to an area that did not have it in order to do the show.  The generator was the obvious answer.  But then I had to ask, "what type of equipment would the show have used?"  "Would a financially strapped traveling show have a shiny new gas generator or would they have chosen to use older but reliable equipment?"  I decided that they would have used older steam equipment.  I wanted the steam equipment to be somewhat eye catching.  It was a traveling "show" after all.  In the time period that the equipment would have come from, some pieces of high end equipment were so ornate that they were themselves works of art.  So, that is how the steam generator, dynamo, and transformer found their way into the diorama.

The cat and the lightening strike are whimsical pieces.  I wanted to pay homage to the Halloween card that served as inspiration.  I also thought it added a little levity to a creepy piece.  Pranks and scares are also a part of the Halloween theme which was brought in by the anthropomorphic pumpkin and by the orange and black Halloween colors.  I think that the cat and lightening bolt added to the story.  Electricity can be frightening and dangerous.  The near miss of the electrical bolt is a reminder of the dangers of electricity.  The visual humor of the distressed cat reminds us that at times we have to laugh at our own fears.  (No cat's were harmed in the making of this diorama.)  I leave it to the viewer to decide whether the electrical bolt was a prank or an accident. 


All in all, I am pleased with my "found object" experiment.  I challenged myself to take some object and turn it into a piece of art.  Since I am so fond of Halloween, it is sometimes difficult to remember that it did not start out specifically as a Halloween piece.  With a different piece of found material, the outcome could have been completely different.  (My previous diorama started out as Halloween themed and ended up as political commentary.  Scroll back through older posts to view it.)  I enjoyed the challenge.  It lead me into unexpected and interesting directions.  It made me stretch my imaginative abilities, and I think that it has helped me gain new perspective on what it means to create art.

Faux Tesla Coil-Part 17- Signs and Base

The family gathering for the holidays has passed.  It is time to get back to work on my project.  It is so close to being completed.  I have to paint the transformer, then I will be assembling the project.  It has taken much longer than I thought it would.  It has been a busy year and I have not had as much free time as in some other years.

 I have done some work on the Tesla Coil part of the project.  I have added some signage, which greatly improved the look of the piece.  The signs were painted on canvas textured art paper and mounted on the metal stand with wire.  The lettering is from a font on the computer which I printed and transferred to the paper once it had been painted with orange paint.  After the lettering was on, I gave it a wash of burnt umber and glaze mix to make the sign look as if it had been around for a while.  The October 31st date was picked because it was a Halloween piece of course.  Also, according to folk tales, spirits could appear once it was dark on Halloween, but had to disappear before dawn the next day.  So naturally, his show would be at the time the time that the pumpkin man could appear.  I also added "last show" because vaudeville shows were disappearing during the time period and I wanted to add that historical note to the piece.


The lower sign is braced with a piece of the legs I cut off from the tower braces.  Readers may remember that I cut down the height of the towers because they overpowered the Tesla coil spheres.  The platform that the lower sign rests on is made of balsa wood.  I scribed the wood slats into it with a number two pencil, then coated the wood with varnish before gluing it to the base of the metal platform. 



The base of the platform is covered with mathematical formulas used in making a Tesla Coil.  They include formulas for figuring out the transformer input and output, capacitive reactance, resonant circuit formula, spiral coil inductance, helical coil inductance, inverse conical coil inductance, and Ohms Law for AC current.  I found the formulas on the internet while I was reading up on how to make a Tesla Coils.  Although this one is just an artistic representation of a Tesla Coil, I read about how to create them in order to give my art work some grounding in reality.  (Pardon the pun.)  I decided to use the formulas because I wanted the ground to have some type of treatment.



When I thought about how I wanted to treat the ground on the diorama, I searched my memory for times I had been to circuses and carnivals.  One of my earliest memories of a circus was seeing an elephant.  The elephant was standing on some hay that had been scattered on the gray, hard- packed ground.  I don't know why the hay made such an impression, but it did.  A later memory of a carnival came to me of tufts of grass poking up here and there and uneven ground. I knew I wanted something on the ground, but previous experience has taught me that vegetative matter can make a terrible mess on a diorama. (Or more specifically, everywhere in the house when the diorama is moved.)  So I turned my thoughts in other directions, and that is when I remembered the formulas.  I thought about what Tesla might have thought about while figuring out how to make the first one.  I imagined him suddenly being struck with an idea, grabbing a pencil and scribbling what came to mind on the first place he saw, so that the thought would not slip away from him.  This is of course only my imagination.  (It is more likely that he was highly disciplined and everything was extraordinarily neat and precise, but this is my imagination, so I can do what I want.)  That is how the formulas came to be written on the base of the diorama.  It adds interest to the piece, takes up some of the bare spots, and looks as if someone were pondering electricity and physics.

My next post will show the completed diorama.  I have to glue the pieces into place and add some wires to represent cables that run from the generator to the Tesla Coil.  I'm looking forward to finishing the project.  I have two projects waiting for me once it is complete.  I can't wait to get started on them.  

Faux Tesla Coil-Part 16-The Lab Coat Experiment

The platform is giving me fits again today. I have spent the last twenty minutes trying to get these three pictures to post in the order in which I want them to appear.  Sorry for the strange configuration of the blog today.

 

As I mentioned in previous blog posts, I was going back and forth about whether to add a lab coat to my anthropomorphic pumpkin figure.  My big worry was that I could not add a paper mache' lab coat to the character without potentially wrecking the figure by accidently getting paper mache' or paint on it.  The concerns were causing me to procrastinate and put off working on it, but I finally worked through the worries and decided to experiment.  Early in the experiment I learned that adding a lab coat was not going to add anything to the story. The lab coat covered up so much of the body of the pumpkin figure that it detracted from the piece. I preferred to allow more of the vegetable body to show.  I'm glad I did the experiment though, because I would have been wondering "what if" rather than knowing for sure.  However, it is worthwhile to blog about my experiment in case anyone should find themself in a similar situation of needing to add a piece of clothing or an item to an otherwise completed figure.

I started out by making a basic lab coat out of a scrap of muslin.  I used basic doll dressmaking techniques to create the garment.  My plan was to make sure that the garment was properly constructed and fit, then deconstruct portions of the garment in order to cover it with paper mache'.  By working on the garment without it being on the figure, it saved the figure from potentially being splattered by the craft materials.  I planned to use rolls of paper towels to act as a dressmakers "ham" to keep the curves of the shoulders in place while the sections were under construction.  The garment would have then been painted and varnished before it was reconstructed on the figure. 

Once the garment was complete, I would have wrapped the head and portions of the body in plastic wrap to protect it from paper mache', paint, or varnish that would have to be used to adhere the parts of the garment.  In areas where I would actually be working to attach the garment sections I was planning to use release paper that I had saved from fusible interfacing project.  Once the figure was protected, I could proceed to re-attach the sections of the lab coat with masking tape and then cover the seams with paper mache'.  Once the paper mache' was dry the seam areas would have been painted and varnished.  Then the release paper would be pulled out from underneath the garment and the plastic wrap removed from around the head.  By using this method only a minimal amount of the release paper might have been stuck to the underside of the area where the sections were joined together. At that point the lab coat would have been loose on the figure.  If it had been loose enough to slip around I planned to put some glue under the shoulder area to hold it in place.

Some people may wonder why I would go to all this trouble.  Why not just use the cloth lab coat.  In this situation, every other piece of the diorama is hard surfaced, painted, and varnished with a high gloss varnish.  The cloth just looked out of place.  If I had proceeded with the experiment, the lab coat would appear to have been made of the same materials as the rest of the diorama.  If this had been a piece that had multiple pieces of fabric, a lab coat made of material would have been fine.

So, now that I am past the lab coat experiment, I only need to make the transformer.  This is the last piece that needs to be constructed.  That will take a few days to get layers of paper mache' on and get it painted and sealed.  After that, I'm putting this whole diorama together.  While I am waiting for the paper mache' layers to dry, I will be doing some embellishment on the platform of the diorama.  You haven't seen the Tesla Coil part of this piece for a while.  You will be see several changes.  Look for that on the next blog post.

Faux Tesla Coil-Part 15-Dynamo and Steam Engine Gauges

I feel like I should be singing my activities of this week to the tune of the song, Twelve Days of Christmas. --- Since I blogged on Wednesday, I've attended two holiday functions, worked on extensive bathroom remodeling, one birthday party, and an unexpected trip out of town. --- It has been a busy week.  Even with all of that, I have managed to get something done on my paper mache' folk art project.  I have a few new pictures of what I've finished up this week.  It is not as much work as I had hoped to get done.

The first picture shows that the gauges have been repainted and mounted on the boiler of the steam generator.  (I am fighting a terrible urge to paint a smile under the gauges to make it look like a happy face.)  Readers may recall that I had painted the gauges last week but the varnish had stripped the paint off of them.  I think I am going to write myself a note and tape it to the bottle of paint that it does not work with that particular varnish. 

The second picture shows the dynamo.  The wire is glued into place on the spool.  The black base of the dynamo is finished with a product that is a combination of gloss gel medium and varnish.  I did not want to take a chance on the varnish stripping the paint off again.  I think the gel medium gave the paper mache' base the appearance of a rough metallic texture.  It could just be that the gel medium was old and did not spread well. 

The last picture is another lightening bolt.  It has been base coated in yellow.  I still need to add another coat to tone down the yellow a bit and add reddish highlights.  This lightening bolt is going to flash near the cat to scare it on the diorama.

I still have not gotten around to attempting to put a lab coat on the anthropomorphic pumpkin.  That will be my priority project for tomorrow.  I'm hoping it will turn out well.  If I mess it up, I have to remake the character.  Decisions, decisions.  I decided I would go ahead and try it because I am not going to let the fear of failure stop me from attempting something.  It is only a piece of aluminum foil covered with paper mache' after all.  (I'll only let my fear of failure make me procrastinate for so long before I finally get on with things.)

There is just one more piece I need to make.  I have not yet made the transformer.  Basically, it is just a rectangular box painted black.  Part of me wants to say the heck with it and just leave it out.  But the geek part of me won't let me forget about it.  If I were building a real Tesla Coil, you would have to have a transformer between the power source and the coil.  It would have to be there in real life.  Most people would not notice it, but I bet a lot of my friends would.  (You guys know it and I know you know it.)  Well, things will get geekier yet, as I have a surprise for something on the diorama.  If it is not on the next blog post, it will be on the one afterwards.  

Faux Tesla Coil Update

I have no new pictures for the blog today.  I'm having one of those days (week actually) where things are so crazy that it feels as if my productivity level is in the negative column.  I have had to repaint the gauges for the steam engine.  I painted them and they looked fine.  I started to put varnish them and the varnish stripped off the black and red paint again.  In a previous blog post I had mentioned that the varnish had stripped some of the paint.  I had momentarily forgotten that the varnish did not work well with some of the paint.  So, I had to repaint them and seal them with some gel medium.  I'm ready to glue them on when I get the chance.

I also attempted to glue the copper wire to the dynamo.  Actually, I partially succeeded.  The piece of wire I started with was not long enough.  I started to glue on another piece of wire to continue wrapping.  The wire is not cooperating.  On my second attempt at gluing the wire I came very close to gluing myself to the project.  I had to put that project aside for a bit until all the glue on the dynamo dried.  I haven't gone back to that project yet because we are in the remodel of the bathroom and I'm working on it with my husband today. 

The base to they dynamo has received another coat of paper mache' and is waiting to be sanded and painted.  At this point it does not look much different from its previous photo.

I think I have figured a way to add a lab coat to my anthropomorphic pumpkin without wrecking it.  I will have new photos by Sunday.  That is about all that is new with this project at the moment.  

Faux Tesla Coil Project-Part 14- Steam Engine

I'm late getting my post up today because internet service has been down in our area since sometime yesterday afternoon.  I'm glad to be back online.  Since I could not blog this morning, my husband and I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and saw the Chihuly glass exhibit.  It was really a unique exhibit and well worth seeing if it comes to your area.

I've been working this week on the steam engine and dynamo for the diorama.  Like the Tesla Coil, it is an artistic representation of a steam engine not a real steam engine.  I wanted the steam engine and dynamo to look like the machines of ages past, when the machine was not just a piece of equipment, but a work of art in its own right.  I'm thinking of times when machines were bronze and polished brass and steel.  I painted the boiler with a metallic bronze.   Since I posted last, I have painted and varnished the components of the steam engine.  I have glued in the pressure relief valve and the on/off lever.  I am still painting on two gauges that will be attached to the front of they boiler.  Once I have all of the other parts completed, I will be adding the gears that represent the the parts that drive the dynamo.

The cylinder of the dynamo is painted with a metallic gunmetal craft paint.  The spokes are painted bronze.  The cylinder will be wrapped with copper wire.  The cylinder of the dynamo is a plastic spool that I covered with paper mache' and then painted.  I would really have preferred to paint it, but none of the paints I have are rated for plastic.  Rather than spend time painting it and risk having it flake off later, I decided to cover it with paper mache'.  It was somewhat difficult to get paper mache' down into those tiny spaces.  I used really small bits of paper and pushed them into the openings with a skewer.

As I was starting to paint the dynamo, I realized that I had never made the base for the dynamo.  I started on that yesterday.  I need to get at least one more layer of paper mache' onto it before I can paint it.  The spool will sit on this stand with a piece of skewer as its axle.

As I posted on the blog recently, I am going back and forth as to whether or not I want to add a lab coat to my anthropomorphic pumpkin figure.  At the moment I am leaning towards making a go of that.  My big fear is that I will mess it up and not be able to fix it.  If that happens, I guess I will start over with a new figure.  That really isn't that much of a problem, but I'm getting close to the end of the project and I'd really like to be finished with it.  Tune in next time to see if it works or not.   

Faux Tesla Coil Project-Part 14- The Steam Engine

Today's post is going to be short because I have to leave for work soon.  I spent my crafting time this week putting varnish on the completed pieces of the anthropomorphic pumpkin and the folk art cat.  The pieces may look a little shinier than before, but that is about it.  However, this is a necessary step in order to preserve the art work.  Paper mache' can be affected by moisture.  Adding an acrylic varnish will add years to the life of the piece. 

Aside from that, I have been working on the steam engine and the dynamo.  It is still in bits and pieces, but progress is being made.  The first photo shows the pieces covered with tape before layers of paper mache' were applied.  I don't have a new photo of the next step yet.  I have painted a base coat on all of the pieces except the gauges.  The gauges (the small round pieces) need to be sanded before they can be painted.  Once they have been painted, I just have to add all the pieces to the boiler shown below in the second photo.  I don't have a picture of the dynamo yet.

The steam engine and the dynamo are the last two large pieces of the diorama.  After that there are only a few minor details.  Once the engine and dyanamo are complete, I will be ready to put all the pieces on the board.  I'm really looking forward to that.  Sometimes, when a project takes longer to complete than I had anticipated, I begin getting bored with the project.  At that point it takes some willpower to finish the piece.  I have learned from experience that pushing through that feeling of being ready to drop it is just part of the process.  Already the siren song of a new project is calling to me.  Soon I'll be letting my readers in on the details of the new projects. 

Faux Tesla Project-Part 13-Folk Art Cat-Tip of the Day

What a coincidence!  I am blogging about Part 13 of this project, and the project is about my folk art black cat.  I did not plan it this way, it just happened.  My last blog post was showing how to create the armature for the folk art cat.  This post is about the experiment of using dryer lint clay to make the final covering for the cat.

I found the recipe for dryer lint clay in a book of craft materials recipes.  The recipe was basically dryer lint mixed with flour paste with one addition.  The author recommended using a preservative to help prevent mold.  In her recipe, she recommended oil of cloves.  In another section of her book she listed other preservatives and said that they could be used interchangeably.  One of the preservatives she listed was Bactine.  I had some of that, so that is what I used.  I also made a couple of other changes to the recipe because I can never just follow a recipe.  I'll tell you what I did as I get further into this post.

First off, my experiment with the basic dryer lint clay recipe.  I mixed the flour paste and added the preservative.  I think that a preservative was a good idea in this case, especially if you were planning to make a solid object from the clay.  It would take a long time to dry.  I used three screen loads of dryer lint.  The lint I used were from mostly cotton clothing: towels, denim, and sheets.  For as flimsy as dryer lint appears to be, it took a lot of flour paste to mix in thoroughly with the lint.  The fibers absorbed a lot of moisture.  It took a lot more kneading than I was expecting to saturate the lint.  I would compare it to felting wool.  A lot of clumps formed in the lint which had to be worked out.  The knots would be wet on the outside, but the inside would be completely dry.  I kept working the material until I had a smooth, wet, sticky mass that was completely free of lumps. 

Then I started thinking. (This is the part where I usually start to make things complicated.)  "What if I added black paint to the clay.  Maybe I would not have to paint the cat after I put the clay on it."  So I added black paint to the clay and started to knead it in.  (Of course, I am wearing gloves.) The black paint turned my multi-colored clay gray streaked through with white threads, which I am guessing were poly-cotton because they were not absorbing the color.  I could actually have gone with this mixture if I were making just any cat.  It could have been a tabby.  However, this is a Halloween cat, so it needs to be black.  I realized that it had taken a large amount of paint to get it to even this gray color.  It really was not cost effective to add enough paint to make the clay a true black.  So I gave up on that idea.

Having never worked with this material before, I was concerned how well the mixture might hold up over time.  I was also concerned as to how well this mixture might adhere to the paper mache' that was already on the cat armature.  To alleviate those concerns, I kneaded some multipurpose white glue into the clay mixture. I also rubbed some white glue over the cat before I covered it with the clay.  Then I pinched off little pieces of the clay and pressed them onto the cat armature, smoothing each piece over the previous one.  It stayed on quite well. 

After I had the cat covered in the dryer lint clay, I used some tweezers and pulled up little clumps of it all over the cat.  In my diorama, the cat is supposed to be hissing and all puffed up.  I wanted my cat to appear as if it was ready for fight or flight.  Pulling up little tufts of the clay gave the cat a very rough appearance.  After I had finished working on the cat, I set it in front of a fan to speed up the drying time.  It took about three days to dry even with the fan blowing on it all day.  With the paint added to the lint clay, it looked and felt like lava rock.  It was rough and very light weight for its size.  (I read that it you use this clay in a press mold it will dry smooth and shiny.  I was going for the opposite look when I pulled up bits of the clay.)  

Once the folk art cat was dry, I painted it with gesso mixed with some black paint to obtain a dark gray color.  I wanted the gesso layer because I was not sure how well paint would stick to the clay if it did not have a primer coat.  Once the folk art cat was covered in gray, I dry brushed black paint over it.  The dry brush technique allowed some of the gray to show through.  This added a bit of depth to the surface and draws attention to the ruffled up areas of the fur.

I used some gray paint to sketch the outline of the cat's face.  Then I painted the features with acrylic paints.  It was a bit difficult to paint the face as the cat is very small.  The face of the cat is only 7/8 of an inch across.  The cat is three and a half inches high at the tail, and four inches long.  When you are painting on something that small,it is really difficult to add a lot of detail.  I decided to paint the cat in Halloween art style using a red mouth and teeth without showing the detail of the tongue. (I still need to add some whiskers.  I am thinking a bristle brush might lose a bristle or two.) It was a lot easier that way.  While I was working on painting in the teeth I figured out a technique that I want to share.  It is in the Tip of the Day in the paragraph below.

Tip of the Day:  Painting Small Detail

I was painting detail so small that my smallest brush was to large to use for the project.  When I was learning to make dolls, some writers suggested that people use the tip of a toothpick to paint in small detail.  I have tried that, and it works well if you are making dots or lines.  But, if you are actually trying to paint details, a toothpick is rather small and hard to hold onto.  I have also used a wooden skewer in this application.  It works better with a longer shaft area to hold onto, but it tends to roll in your hand, which can lead to a painting error.  I found something that works better.

I used a mechanical pencil.  I clicked out the lead a little longer than I would normally use when writing.  I dipped the lead into my paint and gently applied the paint to my project.  I would wipe the lead with a piece of paper towel before the next dip into the paint to remove any paint that had build up on the sides of the lead.  The wider shaft of the mechanical pencil gave me much more control over the paint application.  I feel that I was able to paint better detail than I would have if I had used a toothpick or skewer.

Faux Tesla Coil Project Part 12-Making a Cat Armature

My last post showed the wire armature for the cat.  I'm starting with with the wire armature here for the sake of clarity.  I also have an experimental technique that I want to try out on this cat, but I'm getting ahead of myself.  Let me start from the beginning.

I started out by making a wire armature for the cat.  I used a bit of scrap of copper wire to make the armature.  Actually, this is a case of don't do what I do, do what I say.  This copper strand wire was not really substantial enough for an armature.  As a general rule, I would use an 18 or 20 gauge steel wire.  It is a lot stiffer and holds its shape better.  However, waste not, want not, so I used the scrap that I had available. The armature starts with a short piece for the neck and is bent and folded to form a body, legs, and tail.  Once I had a basic shape, I added heavy duty masking tape to help the wire hold its shape.

I made a ball of aluminum foil for the head and stuck it onto the wire neck.  I used a bit of glue to keep the head in place.  I used some tape to help keep the head in place while the glue dried.  Next I fleshed out the body using aluminum foil and tape.  Now the armature has some basic catlike shape.  That is all that is needed at this point.  The detail will be added in the layers of paper mache' and paint.

The cat now has two layers of paper mache'.  The method is strip paper mache', but the pieces were torn into small squarish pieces rather than long strips.  It needs a third layer before painting.  The first layer was just a layer to get the aluminum foil covered.  Usually I add a little white glue over the armature to help the first layer stick better.  This time I tried something different.  I used an archival spray adhesive rather than painting on the glue with a brush.  It worked fairly well. (This cat is very small.  I don't have any input at this time on how it would work in a larger piece.)  I added the detail of the laid back ears in the second layer.  A third layer is necessary to ensure that the ears are well anchored to the piece.  It is in this third layer that I am planning to experiment with a technique that I have never tried before. 

I try to experiment with some technique in each piece.  Each experiment adds something to my skill set.  By experimenting with the new technique in only one section, if it does not work out, then I only have to recreate a small portion of the piece.  I have a book called Newly Revised Recipes for Art and Craft Materials by Helen Roney Sattler.  It is an older book that I bought used.  (You can pick up these older materials books for a song.  I paid more for the postage to deliver the book than I paid for the book.  They are fairly inexpensive because these days people would rather go buy the material ready made than make it themselves.)  It was in this book that I found my experimental mixture.

For the cat, I want to try a new clay recipe for the final layer.   The book has a recipe for making clay out of dryer lint.  Yes, dryer lint.  Since I have never made it before, I really have no idea how it will turn out, but I am imagining some sort of grainy texture.  I'm hoping that it will give the cat more of a furry appearance than strip paper mache'.  Well, I'll see what happens.  I was actually hoping to have the layer on by today, but it was very rainy yesterday and it took the paper mache' longer to dry.  It was still too damp to add another layer.  So, next post will show the cat with a layer of dryer lint clay.

Faux Tesla Coil Halloween Project-Part 11

It's alive!  Well, not really, more specifically the anthropomorphic pumpkin man, (made in the style popular in the 1920's and 1930s) has been painted and assembled.  However, that component of the diorama is not quite complete, which is why the photo shows him standing propped up against a lamp rather than glued into place.  I want to have the pumpkin man wearing a white lab coat in order to tie into the mad scientist theme.  As this diorama is also about a traveling show, the performer would also be wearing a costume of some sort, so the white lab coat fits in that way as well.  I'll probably work on the coat today.  I've been stalling on that because I have reached a point where I might make things worse rather than better if I don't get it to come out right.  It is a matter of working through that stressful point in order to get on with things.

 While I'm working through the "don't mess it up dilemma", I have been working on a few other parts of the diorama.  I have started working on the cat which will be part of the story.  I made a wire armature and have covered the armature with tape.  At this point, it is a bit confusing when you look at it because the head has not been put on yet.  (When I first viewed the photos, my mind was processing the pictures of the armatures as pictures of a giraffe.  So I understand how you could be confused.)  The armature starts at the neck, then there are the body, legs, and tail.  The head will be built from aluminum foil and placed over the wire of the neck.  Then the rest of the body will also be covered in aluminum foil to flesh out the figure.  After that, you guessed it, covered in paper mache'.  However, it will be paper mache' with a twist.  So check back for my next post to see what I am doing differently with the cat.

Note on the wire armature: This armature is made of multi-strand copper wire used for hanging pictures among other things.  It was not an ideal wire for this application as it bends a little too easily.  If you are going to make a wire armature, I would recommend using a sturdier wire.  This wire is very bendy and will be hard to work with.  Once it is encased in paper mache' it won't really matter though.  

 I have also been working on the parts of the steam engine and dynamo.  I have shaped the parts and covered them with tape to ready them for their coats of paper mache'.  Individually they don't look like much, but once painted and placed on the steam engine they will add a lot of detail that will bring the machinery to life.

 It feels great to be back to working on my project again.  My work schedule has been disrupted by vacation, shopping for Christmas, and the Thanksgiving holiday.  I enjoyed all of that, but now I am ready to get back to work on my project.  I hope that between now and the next holiday I will have a fair amount of time to work on my Faux Tesla Coil Halloween Project.

Next time:  Special treatment to create the cat.

More Folk Art from the Cabin

I wanted to post a few more photos of the folk art from the cabin.  I wish I were a better photographer.  A lot of the pictures looked okay when I viewed them on the screen of the camera after taking them, but when I looked at them on the computer they did not look as nice.  So, when I go up in the spring, I will be retaking a lot of photos.  There is still more folk art that I wanted to take pictures of anyway.

The first photo is a picture of a painted rock.  I believe that this is a Ray Maybe piece also.  It is painted in his style.  It is a little picture of a person hiking in the mountains.  The front of the rock is very smooth.  It breaks off from a larger piece of rock in a fairly straight line.

Second photo:  This is a photo of the wood box at the cabin and a set of bellows.  My husband made these bellows about twenty-five years ago.  They are based on instructions that were printed in Mother Earth News.  They have held up well over the years.

Third photo:  I'll need to take a better picture of this painting.  It is a self-portrait painted by my mother.  She spent a lot of time at the cabin and loved it dearly.  I can't begin to tell you how much work she put into this cabin.  She helped install the flooring.  She painted inside and out.  And she hauled a lot of rock out of the stream to help maintain the dirt road.  I feel that her portrait watches over the place.

The last photo is a painted sign that hangs over the door.  I don't know if this was a commercial piece or if someone made it specifically for my father.  My father loved this sign.  A long time ago, there was a popular song called Those Were the Days My Friend  sung by Judy Collins.  The song was about two older people reminiscing about good times from their past.  My father was rather fond of the song, and this sign at the cabin is a reminder to take time to make memories.

Next time:  Now that I am back home, I've finished up the painting on the anthropomorphic pumpkin man.  I expect to have him glued together by the time I post on Sunday.  There will be new photos.

  

Folk Art Photos from the Cabin

I can see that my regular readers have been checking in to look for my latest post.  I have been away to our cabin in the mountains.  I have not done any work on my Faux Tesla Halloween Project since I left.  I thought I'd post some pictures of the folk art and the interior of the cabin today.  I hope it will be a treat to friends and family who have spent time there and have wonderful memories of it.  Hopefully, the rest of my readers will enjoy the pictures as well.  Once again, I will apologize to my readers for the crazy format.  If I want to get all of my pictures on here I have to put the paragraphs in an unusual formation.

This is the wood cook stove at our cabin.  Anyone who has been there knows that many great meals have been prepared on it.  Although we have some space heaters to help keep the place warm, my husband and I prefer to keep the stove going when it is cold.  If you look closely, you can see the steam coming from the spout of the kettle.  During the summer we prefer to cook on the porch on a camp stove, or use the microwave or toaster oven, because once this stove heats the place up it can take hours to cool the place down.

The stove burns wood quickly.  At this time of year we will fill the wood box completely full three to four times a day.  Some years would wood has been purchased.  However, the last couple of years we have had to remove trees that were threatening the house so my husband, son, daughter-in-law, and I have split and stacked our own wood.  It is a lot of work.

The Rocky Mountain Cabin sign on the top of the rack is carved into an old piece of a chair seat.  If anyone in the family knows who made the piece, please let me know.  I did not take it down to check the back for the signature, but there is not one on the front.  The lower sign is one that is commercially available.  In front of that sign are some old rusty spikes from a railroad spur that ran up the mountain generations ago.  It was built to bring logs down off the mountain when the area was being used for logging.  Once in a while someone finds a spike or piece of a switch.  That is all that is left of the railroad line.

One of my favorite pieces of folk art at the cabin is the cutting board, knife and pot rack created by Ray Mabe.  The folk art decorations run around the entire perimeter of the board.  It has resided at the cabin for many years.  Ray enjoyed painting in a primitive style.  Not everyone cares for this style, but I love this piece.  The bottom picture is a close up of the picture on the front of the cutting board.  You can see the RM signature of Ray Mabe painted on the rock to the right of the center fence post in the picture.

As Thanksgiving is this week, I will be pretty busy.  I will be posting some more pictures of the folk art on Wednesday.  By next Sunday I should have the latest pictures of the Faux Tesla Halloween Project.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Pumpkin on a Hay Bale Art Doll

Just when you thought Halloween was over, here comes another of my creations.  This pumpkin man has a body made of wire, batting, string, and muslin.  His head is made from bake in the oven clay.  He is painted with craft paints.  Raffia was glued to the ends of the arms and legs to make him a scarecrow. (Once again the blog platform is giving me fits.  It won't allow me to have the next paragraph in its proper place. I had to add this filler or else there was a big blank space you might miss seeing all the photos.)

The little ghosts, bat, pumpkin, moons, and stars that are glued onto the flag and the piece of twine came from a craft store.  They were glued on with hot glue.  The flag has a piece of floral wire between the two layers of cloth to make it rigin enough to appear to be waving.

The hay bale is a piece of Styrofoam covered with bits of raffia.  I thought that I would cover the block of Styrofoam with white glue, sprinkle on some bits of raffia and be done with it.  Was I ever wrong on that idea.  The raffia did not stick well with the white glue.  Sprinkling raffia did not give the impression of a real bale of hay.  I had to go with a rather labor intensive Plan B.  I had to swipe a small area with tack glue, then lay the pieces of raffia down individually in organized rows.  I added the twine because that is how I remember bales of hay, rectangles tied with twine.  Now most hay comes in giant rolls.

The hay bale is a piece of Styrofoam covered with bits of raffia.  I thought that I would cover the block of Styrofoam with white glue, sprinkle on some bits of raffia and be done with it.  Was I ever wrong on that idea.  The raffia did not stick well with the white glue.  Sprinkling raffia did not give the impression of a real bale of hay.  I had to go with a rather labor intensive Plan B.  I had to swipe a small area with tack glue, then lay the pieces of raffia down individually in organized rows.  I added the twine because that is how I remember bales of hay, rectangles tied with twine.  Now most hay comes in giant rolls.

The shirt is made from unbleached muslin.  The overalls are made from a scrap of blue cotton duck material.  They looked rather plain so I added a few patches in orange.  That changed the outfit from something plain to something eye catching. 

Although this is appears to be a simple project, it took many hours to complete.  This figure in only seven and a half inches tall.  Working in such small detail in very time consuming.  It takes more dexterity to work with small details.      

Faux Tesla Coil Halloween Project-Part 10

My apologies to regular readers for not getting my blog post up yesterday.  I was called in to work before I had time to get on the computer.  I usually try to get to the blog first thing on Wednesdays. 

I have made some progress on painting the anthropomorphic pumpkin figure.  I painted the body, head, arms, and legs, then gave all the parts a glaze of burnt umber to highlight the pits and bumps.  Once the glaze was painted on, I lifted off most of it with paper towels.  The remaining glaze gives the vegetables the appearance of texture and age.  The varying colors invite the viewer to examine it more closely.  I still need to paint the face on the pumpkin head.

I have also painted the base and boiler of the steam engine.  I still have a lot of work to do on this part of the diorama.  There will be more bells and whistles on it when it is finished.  Also, I need to add the fly wheel and push rods that will connect it to the dynamo.  I have not begun to work on those parts yet.