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.