DJRlife

Chatherine Zeta-Jones' Boat

2009-08-27T11:06:00.000-04:00

Or at least that the rumor I choose to spread based purely on an
obscure twitter post.

The only reason I think it's cool is it has a helicopter on the back.
Very bond villain.

Look it's me in a Sobeys poster

2009-08-20T12:55:00.001-04:00

Old Shower Curtain

2009-08-13T20:27:00.001-04:00

New shower curtian to debut this weekend.

Mushroom Clowds In Toronto

2009-07-18T20:47:00.000-04:00

Piping Plover Wasaga Beach

2009-07-14T20:31:00.000-04:00

iPhone camera not good enough to capture these small birds, but this
is the enclosure they built to protect them.

Wasaga Wind

2009-07-11T21:26:00.001-04:00

Wasaga Beach Board Walk

2009-07-11T21:05:00.001-04:00

Wasaga beach sun set

2009-07-11T21:04:00.001-04:00

There be Monsters!

2009-07-10T15:38:00.001-04:00

My Favourite Atrium

2009-07-09T17:39:00.001-04:00

The Photo Post From My iPhone

2009-07-09T17:12:00.001-04:00

Kimi.

Test Post From My iPhone

2009-07-09T17:05:00.001-04:00

This is a test of posting from my iPhone.

Derek

Sent from my iPhone

It's been a While

2007-10-25T22:57:00.000-04:00

Well it's been a while since I've posted to my blog. It may be a while longer before I post again. I was having more fun doing stuff, then writing about it, so I kind of stopped writing. I think I touched on this in my very first post. I didn't want to write so much. I was just going to put up pictures and a few comments. I'll try to actually do that sometime.

Anyway sorry for leaving the LA break-in as my last post for so long. Rest assured I'm fine, the car is fixed, and I got a new cell phone for $30. I'm now back in TO, back at work, and all is well.

California: Welcome to LA

2007-03-06T01:07:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I went into LA for the first time. It's about an hour drive into the city from Irvine. I went into the city to see a show at the El Rey Theatre on Wilshire Blvd. It seemed a rather nice area of town. According to the signs that area is referred to as the Golden Mile. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, I went into the show at 3:00pm. I came out about 6:30. When I returned to my car I discovered the rear passenger window had been smashed. It was kind of a surreal moment. Is the window really smashed? If I look away and look back is it still broken? Why did this happen?

Once I knew it was real the internal swearing swearing started. Then slight panic about what to do. Finally I decided to check to see what was taken. Sure enough my backpack was taken from the back seat. I check around the rest of the car to see what else might have been taken. I check the back of the car and nothing was touched there. I looked in the glove compartment, nothing was taken there. I looked in the arm rest where I had put my iPod, and it was still there. As far as I could tell all they took was my backpack.

I stared think about what was in my backpack. I knew my cell phone was in there, but I couldn't remember exactly what else. I know I had taken out most of my important documents. I did remember there was $300 is travelers checks though. I know I could get those back, but I didn't relish the process. Also the backpack it self wasn't cheap.

When trying to decide what to do next, I though about what this person or persons may have done after taking the backpack. The usual strategy for this type of robbery is to smash, grab and run. Stop somewhere close by, pick out the good stuff and ditch the bag. So I decided to start looking around.

I knew they wouldn't have crossed the street, too busy and the lights take too long to change. I decided to do a sweep a block in each direction and see what I could find. There were still lots of people about so I didn't feel it was too risky.

I was parked on Wilshire Blvd next to a construction site which occupied an entire block. On the corner of the next block was a Hollywood Video store. I decided to look behind that store. There was a parking lot and a set of dumpsters. A quick look showed up nothing. I then walked back towards the construction site and along the small road behind it. The other side of the street was bushes along the side of houses. I looked in the bushes as I walked along the road, but no sign of the bag.

I turned down the next street and looked in the garbage cans that where put out at each house. Nothing so far. I then walked the next block behind another construction site, then turned back towards Wilshire Blvd. I hadn't spotted anything so far. There was a parking garage there so I took a look through the first floor, but it was too well lit, I didn't think they would have gone there.

Once back on Wilshire Blvd. I walked back to the car feeling really dejected. I had a good idea, just no luck finding anything. Once back at the car I realized I hadn't look into the construction site itself. I decided walk around it again and look over the fence at strategic locations. When I got around to the small back street again I spotted a black blob on the dirt just past the fence. It was about the right size to be my bag. I moved closer and took a better look over the fence. It was a chain link fence with tarps attached to it so you couldn't see what was on the other side. It was also setup with no top bracing so the fence would really flex if you put weight on it. Not good for climbing. But I did manage to confirm that the black blob was in fact my backpack.

So I had found it, but now how was I going to get it. The fence was too hight to reach over and too difficult to climb at this point. I thought about various options but the only one that wouldn't take hours to execute was to just hop the fence and grab it.

I looked for a good place, and there was a gate in the fence along one of the other sides. I tried to see if I could squeeze through under the chain that held the two halves of the gate closed, but it was just a little too tight. At that point I said screw it I'll just hop it. I put my foot on the lock chain, hoisted myself up and over.

Fortunately the construction site was just in the clearing stage. I knew there was a small pit back closer to the car, but the rest of the area was a flat dirt field. I walked careful around, following the fence line to where my bag was. When I got to it, it was definitely my bag.

Two of the three main compartments where open. I looked in the front compartment where the cell phone was. Sure enough it was gone. $30 phone, and $90 in minutes gone. My travelers checks were still there though. That was handy from a paper work point of view.

In the large back compartment everything had been mixed up, but nothing had been taken. There wasn't anything of real value anyways. Sun screen, Kleenex and some rice crispy squares.

So I picked up the bag, worked my way back to the gate, hopped back over and returned to my car. At this point I feeling much better. I had managed to retrieve my bag, and was quite happy with myself figuring out how to find it.

I decided I should make some phone calls and went and found a pay phone.

Other then the window the car was fine. Before it got too late I decided I'd head back to Irvine and continue the calls from there. It's always best to move to a safe location and work from there. No-one can criticize you for reducing risk. The car was going to be much safer in my friends driveway, and I was going to be much safer back at his place.

So at the end of the day I saw an awesome show, but was down a cell phone and a window.

California Bound: Day Four

2007-02-19T18:24:00.000-05:00

(Sunday, January 1, 2006)

The first day of the New Year was mostly about driving. However we did take an hour out of our day to drive around Downtown Memphis. The downtown was mostly deserted, I suspect most normal people were recovering from New Years parties the night before.

The downtown is like most Cities downtown, but I did like the look of this old building.

Just a little bit out of the downtown is a street with a set of old Victorian homes. My Dad found a reference to these in a guide book and wanted to check them out. They are very cool, and there are more then just these three. Most of them are now Museums. Other then these buildings, which look very well kept the area around them was quite run down. A sign of how the times changes.

This giant pyramid was an odd sight. It's on the waterfront by the Mississippi just north of the downtown. It reminded me of the Luxor in Las Vegas. It's a massive building, but I couldn't figure out what it was for.

After a little research on the web it turns out it's a stadium. Seats about 20,000 for Basket Ball. I was half expecting it to be church of some sort.

Here's a picture of the bridge that crosses the Mississippi. It's a big river.

This is the view from the bridge looking north. The barge in this picture is the same barge to the left in the previous picture. The bit of land to the left may or may not be Arkansas. It's actually an island, and I don't know which side of the river it belongs to. This means it may or may not be the only picture of Arkansas I included.

Finally it's a picture at the first rest stop in Oklahoma. Arkansas was not a particularly interesting drive. The first half was swamp, the second half was light rolling hills.

For the most part Oklahoma was flat. Especially up to Oklahoma City.

We stayed at a Howard Johnson's in Oklahoma City, and had dinner at a classic Denny's. The town was dead quiet. There was no-one at all about. The waiter/manager at the Denny's, which was mostly empty, explained that Oklahoma was in the Fiesta Bowl in Phoenix. Everyone was at home watching the game. It was always like this when the team was playing.

The next morning the complimentary breakfast room had a waffle machine. I like the waffle machine. But that's the next day.

California Bound: Day Three

2007-01-31T23:20:00.000-05:00

(Saturday, December 31, 2006)

A day under Kentucky. The first stop today for my Dad and I was Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky. We had been here once before when I was a kid. I really wanted to get back and do another tour.

The day before I had used me brand new cell phone to call ahead about tour tickets. According to the service there were only two tours running. Turns out in winter they don't run most of the tours. In actuality there were 4. However they weren't that busy. Of the 114 spots on the tour I had selected there where only 8 advanced bookings. All the literature on the park says book in advance so you won't be disappointed. With a 106 opening I decided it was unnecessary to book in advance. In Summer I can believe it's a very good idea to book in advance.

The tour we ended up taking was the Frozen Niagara Tour. The tour I really wanted to take was the River Styx Cave Tour, which goes into the deepest part of the caves. Unfortunately it wasn't being offered at this time of year. There used to be a tour that had boats that you rode on the river. This is the tour we tried to take when I visited as a kid, but we just missed out on the timing.

I heard two different reasons for the boat tour being discontinued. The official one seems to be it was affecting the natural wild life in the cave. The less official reason given by a ranger we talked to was the cave was getting unpredictable flooding which was both dangerous and damaging the docks and walkways. He then went on to describe a few tours he was on when he had to get the boats out of there fast because the water was rising. He said the final year they ran the tour they only managed to run it 18 days during the season.

The Frozen Niagara Tour starts with a bus ride out into the woods. From the 8 people who had booked in advance the group grew to around 50. After getting off the bus we all walked down a small path into a depression in the ground. Likely a sink hole. At the bottom was a rather surreal looking stainless steal door.

This was our tour guide April. She did a wonderful job, and had a lovely southern accent. There was a second ranger there who took up the rear of the tour group. He had some good stories as well.

The first part of the tour is through a man made tunnel which was blasted out of the rock. This was only a short distance though. Then began the natural cave, and a long decent down. The stairway was stainless steal. It was apparently installed in the 90s at a cost of over $1000 a step. They replaced the wooden stairs that were there before.

The story behind the installation of the new stairs was quite interesting. They had to go through several contractors before they could find once that would do the job in a way they could except. The resulting contractor turned out to be a submarine refitter. They could work in tightly confined spaces, and only wanted to do a limited amount of blasting.

There were more them 300 steps down in this part of the cave.

Once at the bottom of this set of stairs the rest of the tour was pretty flat. This makes sense. The layers of rock are pretty level in this area and once you reach a cave bearing layer the cave is going to follow it.

One of the things I found interesting was there are no recorded rock falls in this part of the cave. There were some pretty precarious looking rocks though. Apparently the there was a large rock break free in the natural entrance area one particularly cold winter. I think they said the piece was about the size of a car.

One thing thats kind of freaky to me is the large perfectly flat spans of rock across the ceiling. And this tour doesn't have the largest of them. It makes sense that they form this way. The layers of rock are very flat, so as the layers below fall away they will reveal the bottom side of the layer above. If a layer is particularly strong it will form a large flat ceiling over time. It's impressive how large and how flat it can be.

After working our way through a long series of caverns referred to as dormant caves, we came to a section of dieing cave. This is the Frozen Niagara part of the tour. This is where water is actively depositing material in the cave forming classic cave features like stalactites and stalagmite.

The reason this is referred to as dying cave is because it is actively being filled in. Eventually these deposits will close in the cave completely. Living cave is where the cave is actively being expanded by water erosion.

The reason it's called Frozen Niagara is somewhat obvious. It hard to capture the full extend of it with a camera, but the rock does look like a massive cascade of water over a cliff.

Finally we exited the cave through another surreal looking door. I don't have a picture of it, but it was a revolving door, and out into the woods again.

The reason for the revolving door is keep air from entering the cave. The wild life in the cave does much better when the cave is breathing naturally. Having a large opening throws things off. The cave maintains a very constant temperature. Many of the creatures, can't handle more then a few degrees of temperature changes.

After the tour we walked down to view the natural entrance to the cave. This is where most tours start, but is a couple of miles from the section of cave we viewed. The natural entrance is very much the classic cave entrance. We couldn't go far inside though as it was closed off to guided tours in the winter.

We finished up at the park a little after noon. We then headed off for lunch and on to Memphis Tennessee. Along the way we stopped at the John Cash rest stop on the Music Highway. Or I-40 as it's shown on most maps. This highway would take us the rest of the way across the country.

California Bound: Day Two

2007-01-28T13:23:00.000-05:00

(Friday, December 30, 2006)
Unfortunately the hotel didn't have a Breakfast included, fortunately there was a Bob Evans right next door.

Today was a day it was important to get away in good time. We were going to the Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio. The one area of the museum I had never been to was the Presidential and Experimental Aircraft hangers. This is a special area in a different part of the base. It requires registering early, because they only take a very few people over there in a day.

On the drive over to the museum one funny thing caught my eye. I wish I got a picture of it. My friends and I always joke about how every thing in the U.S. has corn syrup in it. I swear it's even in the ingredient lists of things like tooth paste and asphalt. Not really but when you start reading ingredient lists on packages it starts becoming surprising when something doesn't have it.

Anyway on the drive over to the museum we saw this massive chemical plant. It looked like it was right out of Steampunk. There were pipes running everywhere and steam was billowing out of everything. I joked to my dad, it's probably makes corn syrup. Sure enough as we passed the main entrance, it was a corn syrup plant.

We got to the National Museum of the USAF just after opening at 9:00 pm, and bee lined it for the registration desk for the Presidential and Experimental tour. We got there just in time to get on the first trip of the day. Good thing too. I thought they just shuttled people over and back every hour or so, but instead they drive you over wait, then bring you back. This means the next opportunity to get over there wasn't until 12:00 pm or so. This would have been impossible with our travel plans.

Here are some pictures from the presidential hanger. From an aircraft point of view, it's the older planes that grab my interest. Beyond that the idea of standing in an aircraft that one or more famous presidents had spend a great deal of time was kind of impressive. Especially when you realize how small and how slow the early aircraft really were.

Unfortunately the hanger is so tightly packed it is next to impossible to get a decent picture of any of the aircraft. The experimental aircraft hanger was equally as densely packed.

These pictures are of the YF-12A. It was to be an interceptor fighter but never made it into operational service. It's more familiar counter part the SR-71 Blackbird was developed on the same basic airframe. I've seen many SR-71s. The main museum has one, I've seen one on the deck of the Intrepid in New York and in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington. It's interesting to look at this aircraft to see the similarities and differences. The biggest difference is there is a fold down tail fin at the rear. There are a lot of other more subtle differences like the shape of the chines around the nose.

The pictures below are of one of my favorite aircraft. The XB-70 Valkyrie. This is one big airplane. It stretches from one end of the hanger to the other. It's so tall there are many other aircraft parked underneath it. It's to the bomber what the SR-71 is to reconnaissance planes. It's got a lot of really funky innovations in aerodynamics. Plus I just love the look of it.

Next we have the XF-85 Goblin one of the strangest looking aircraft I've ever seen. It was designed to be carried on board a bomber to be used as an escort fighter when over enemy territory.

Finally it's the Tacit Blue. OK the Goblin was strange looking but this thing just looks like a bus that had wings stuck on it. I've seen it many times at the Museum. It used to be housed back in the main museum. Every time I see it I just have to stand back and say what hell?

Finally a picture from the main museum. This is actually a rather creepy aircraft in my opinion. It's of Boxcar the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. There are a lot of military aircraft that have killed a lot of people, but this one and the Enola Gay ushered in a new era of human destruction.

So after our tour of the Presidential and Experimental aircraft, we did a quick tour of the main museum. It was all pretty much what I had seen in my several other trips to the museum. We left the museum shortly after noon and had Lunch at a Wendy's near by.

One thing I wanted to get was a cell phone. I figured it would be good insurance during our drive, and I might find it handy around town. So we found a local mall and found a T-Mobil store. The choice was simple, I knew someone that had gotten one there and they liked it. beyond that I didn't want to spend the time to do more research. So I picked up the cheapest phone, with a 1000 minutes prepaid time which is good for a year. Unlike Canada, cell phones and plans aren't all that expensive in the U.S.

From here we drove on to Cave City in Kentucky for the night. We stayed at the worst hotel of the trip that night. It was a Knights Inn. It wasn't really bad, but it wasn't very nice either. The included breakfast was weak as well. But that's part of the next day.

Sculpture: Pigon

2007-01-26T15:03:00.000-05:00

(May 2006)
This is sculpture is another small one like the Dancer. Like the Dancer I was board of modeling from life and decided to so something from my head. This one was original going to be more doll like, like the Dancer, but as I worked on it I added more and more detail. So it's kind of half way between the doll look and a realistically model.

I also wanted to add cloths to this one, but I ran out of modeling time. Cloths were going to take at least one more class then I had time. I like it as it is, but I wanted to make her look like she was part of a yoga class.

The pose is known as pigeon. This is a tricky pose that I've never seen anyone do live. Although I suspect a few people I've seen in class would be capable of it. My rendition has a few problems with it. When a real person does the pose there is more bending from the lower back, the head is almost upside down and looking backwards and the back thigh is closer if not flat on the ground. There is just a little too much backwards bend in the back leg.

When I stared it I hadn't seen the pose in a while so I was going completely from memory. I was also going for a particular look, and having here looking straight up was an important to the look I was going for.

The top pictures are of the sculpture in its clay form. This is the state it gets to just before beginning the molding process. The design is complete but the structure of the mold has not been completed.

The middle set of the photos is of the sculpture with the mold walls added. In most cases clay is used to build the walls between the different sections of the mold. In this case the sculpture was so small it was difficult to build the clay walls. The teacher suggested I try copper shims. The shims are cut from a very thin sheet of copper.

This particular mold is three pieces. This was done because there are three separate loops of open space in the model. If I didn't make the mold three pieces it would have been very difficult if not impossible to remove the clay and prep the mold for casting. However each piece you add to the mold increases the complexity of building and casting the mold. My rule of thumb is it takes one class for every section of mold you need just to build the mold. From there the prep time for casting the mold is about the same regardless of the number of pieces.

The copper was interesting to work with compared to the clay. The sections of copper closing in the inner loops I actually left in and were enclosed by the mold. This made for some flashing that I needed to break off and clean up, but otherwise worked great.

I treated the outside pieces the same as I would treat a clay wall when mold making. Once one side was built up in plaster I removed the copper and prepared a slip wall so I could apply plaster to the next section and pieces would still separate. I learned later that when using copper shims you are supposed to just leave them all in place. However I think it worked much better doing it the way I did it.

The final set of pictures is of the mold itself. The first one shows the size of th mold when it's all together. The second photo is the inside of the three pieces, and final it's the inverted mold filled with Densite. I cast this particular mold up at a cottage I was renting with friends from work. Casting is one of the few things I can do outside of class, however I have to do it somewhere I can get messy.

Once the Densite has cured in the mold the mold is chiseled off. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the final piece yet. That will have to wait for another post.

California Bound: Day One

2007-01-21T23:34:00.000-05:00

(Friday, December 29, 2006)
California Bound will be the story of my drive out to California with my Dad. Overall the trip was great and we saw a lot of interesting things. Day One however was not as smooth as I would have hoped.

The first day was to be the drive from London to Dayton Ohio. About a 5-6 hour drive including crossing the border as a tourist. However, since I'm going to be working I needed to get TN-Status at the border. I knew from friends this would take at least a hour at the border, longer if there were any problems.

We left London shortly after 9am, for the border crossing at Sarnia-Port Huron. I chose this crossing because it's closer to London then the Windsor crossing and the border is not as confusing as the US side in Detroit.

We arrived in Sarnia and I suggested we go to the bathroom before crossing the border. We might be standing in line for a while. So we stopped at the Tourist Information Booth on the Canadian side. A beautiful new building, with this giant statue of Canada Geese landing in a pond out front. I wish I took a picture, but I wasn't in tourist mode yet.

We used the washrooms and said hi to the lady on the desk. Told her we were off to California.

We got back on the road and drove up to the border. There was a 15-20 minute line of cars. We got up to the booth. I told the guard I needed to apply for NT-status. He gave me a little slip of paper and directed me where to go. I parked the car and we walked in to the building. When we got in line, I was second in line. It still took about 10 minutes before it was my turn. But they had a lot of booths open. At this point things were looking good.

When it was my turn I walked up to the booth and told the guy that I was applying for TN-status. He started into the rapid fire questions. The kind they use to try and trip up someone that's trying to be deceptive. I always feel I suck at this kind of questioning. In fact I suspect I would suck if I was trying to be deceptive. Since I never am, I do fine.

Eventually he asked to see my paper work so I got it out and presented it to him.

This is where things went down hill fast. He was happy to see my degree, but he was very unhappy with the job offer letter I had. I remained calm the entire time, and answered his questions as best I could. I think because of this he was very nice and polite and helpful, but when all was said and done, he couldn't let me in based on the letter I had.

problems. My I was concerned the letter was insufficient when I received it. I knew it had several potentialconcerns were validated when he pointed out each item I thought might be a problem, was a problem. And a significant one, from all my reading, I didn't even know. So he pulled out a sheet of paper with a check list of about 6 items on it. Each item had an explanation of a requirement for the letter. He check off 4 of the 6 as being deficient in my letter.

So what could have been a quick crossing was just starting to get very complicated. At this point the process had taken over an hour, and the only thing we could do now was go back across the border. He gave me a coupon for the toll to get back across, and a letter for Canada Customs and Immigration. He also told me I could try again as soon as I got a better employment letter. If I could get it faxed to me back in Sarnia, I could come back as soon as I got it.

My Dad and I thought it would really suck to have to head back to London. I had my Cell Phone with me. My Dad had his calling card. We started thinking about places we could go where we could call the Professer at UCI and received a fax of a new letter. Just in case she could turn it around in a few hours.

My Dad suggested we try the Tourist Information, so we went there to see if they could do any thing for us. First we called home and got the Fax number for a neighbour in case we had to head home. My Dad talked to lady at the information desk. She was very nice and said she could receive a Fax or an email for us. This was an awesome thing for her to do.

I called the Professor at the University I was going to work for and explained what happen. I then explained what was wrong with the letter. I also told her we had a local fax number and email address she could send a new letter to. She took down the details and said she'd call me back when a new letter was ready. This was great news. If we could get it in a few hours it would save so much effort.

Well she called me back on the cell about 20 minutes later ready with the new letter. She wanted to read it back to me to make sure it covered all the necessary points. We got through the letter and it sounded fine to me. At this point I hear her say hi to her 13 month old daughter. She was at home and her daughter had walked into her office. Then I here, oh, don't touch that! Then silence.

The daughter had hit the power button, on the computer. She said she'd have to call me back.

About 30 minutes or so later I get the call back. Turns out the computer wouldn't restart. It blue screened after being turned back on. So she had to get out her Mac Book, which she was still transferring over to, and rewrite the letter. However it was ready. We reviewed it, and it sounded good to me again. At this point it was easier for her to email it, because she was at home and didn't have a Fax machine handy.

So she sent the email to the lady at the Information Desk's account. It took about 10 minutes for it to come through. When it finally did, it didn't have the letter attachment. Oh great, what more could go wrong. I was thinking, what if the email server for this government office is stripping all attachments. This could really suck. I called the professor back and she checked to see if the attachment was on the letter that was sent. Turns out she had made an error and it didn't get attached. She sent it again, about 10 minutes later it came through.

The lady at the information desk was very kind and printed me of a few copies for me.

We were all set to try again.

We got in the car and headed for the border. We got over the bridge and the line was very short. We got up the booth and who was in the booth but the guy who had sent me back the first time. He didn't recognize me at first, they see a lot of people in a day. I reminded him. He then asked me a few questions about how I had gotten the new letter. He then asked to look at it. He looked it over and said much better, and sent me over to the office.

Well the car line was short this time, but the people line was about 50 feet outside the door. Thank goodness for the mild winter we were having up to that point.

my request, explained what had happened It took about an hour in line before I got to the front. They very generously started taking shorter cases from behind me in line, thus making my wait even longer. At one point a guard looked at my slip and said, "Oh, that's not short." and walked back further in line. When I finally got to the front of the line I saw a different officer. It was very crowed around the booths at this point, so she directed me behind the counter to another area of the office. She looked over my paper work, asked who had sent me away the first time. I explained I had seen him at the booth coming over, and he was satisfied with the new letter. She then took it to her superior. He looked it over and signed off on it. He look up at me and said, this is exactly what we are looking for.

It took another half an hour for all the work to be done. Most of it involved me just standing there at the counter, while the officer pecked away at her computer.

When it was all done and over with, she stapled this small unimpressive square bit of paper into my passport and sent me on my way.

I collected my Dad from the waiting area, we went to the car and drove on to Dayton. In the end it took about 5 hours to get across the border. We were running much later then planned, but decided we should push it to Dayton to get back on schedule.

Our first stop across the border was the Port Huron Tourist Information. I was now in the States all set to start a new adventure.

He stopped just south of Detroit for dinner. Then on to a Red Roof Inn just outside of Dayton for the night. A long day, but we were on our way.

This is the Tourist Information Center in Port Huron. Our first stop on the journey to California. The flags are at half staff for President Ford. This would end up being one of the themes of the trip. There are still places around here that have their flags at half staff.

California

2007-01-08T19:06:00.000-05:00

I'm in California now!

So I'll be updating with details of my drive out here soon. Currently I'm going through all the head aches of getting settled in at the University. Things like getting a bank account, University ID, computer accounts, room keys, library card, social security number, etc. All of which seem to need one or more of the others to get, which is hard when you don't have any of them.

In the end hopefully all it will mean is just a lot of running around, and nothing more then that.

The drive out in brief, was very good. No problems with weather. I drove out with my Dad and we seemed to arrive in places just as they finished digging out from storms. So it was perfect timing. We left London on the 29th of December and arrived in Irvine on the 5th of January.

I'll fill in further details soon.

Element: 3 Years of Fill-ups

2006-11-25T15:38:00.000-05:00

I've now had the Element almost 3 years so I decided to it was time to analyze all the fill-up data I've collected over the years. Every time I get gas I fill the tank, then I record the date, odometer, volume of gas, and amount spent.

So I just took all this information and plug it into a trusty spread sheet and generated some cool graphs and some useless one.

The overall data:
Total Spent on Gas: $2774.37
Total Litres purchased: 3332.845L
Average price of Gas: 83.24 Cents/L
Average Fuel Economy: 10.45 L/100km
Average Fuel Economy: 22.50 Miles/Gallon

Now for some pretty graphs. The first one is the odometer reading over time. Obviously this one will always go up. What's interesting is that the amount of driving I do is fairly constant as shown by the slope of the graph, except for 2 humps. These hump just happen to be the times I drove to Brickfest in Washington D.C.

The next graph is fuel economy. This one varies a lot. This is mostly do to driving habits. After some fill-up I'll do lots of highway driving, and after others it will be more city. But I do find it interesting that there appears to be an annual cycle forming. Overall fuel economy appears to be better through the summer and into the fall, the through the winter and spring.

This graph is the price of gas over time. It has nothing to do with my vehicle other then you can see how bad the price of gas was at the end of last summer.

No we get into some silly graphs, like how much gas I put in per fill up. Hmm, just over 2oo km is the minimum, I wonder why that is. I seem to do a lot of driving to somewhere 200km away, fill-up, then turn around and come back.

Finally another mostly useless graph. This one shows the average number of kilometres I travel per day for each fill up. The two large spikes are the trips to Brickfest. The next size spikes are most likely quick turnaround trips to that place 200km away.

Sculpture: Guay Head

2006-11-19T21:50:00.000-05:00

(November 2006)
My previous post about Guay was a lead in to this one. Ever since I met Guay I've always wanted to sculpt her head.

When she first came to the class to model she had this wonderful chaotic hair style. The only thing I can think of close to it is Andy Warhol's hair. Short and sticking out all over. It looked awesome. But I was casting at the other end of the class, so I could only think about how cool it would be to sculpt her.

Then the next time she was in she was completely bald. Which was great because it was the first time I could actually see the structure of the scull on a models head. My previous two head sculptures do have some problems with proportion on the back of the head.

Unfortunately the second time she was in I was also working on casting.

Finally this year I get my chance. She had a small tuft of hair above her forehead so she's effectively bald. Ideal for me, but she was the first model of the term, and the teacher likes to do several quick, half class poses for the first two classes, then one full class pose. Three classes being the longest we get with a single model. Not ideal.

I wanted to do this piece so badly though. I haven't work so hard and so fast on something like this in a long time. It was great. I had one three hour class to get as much done as I possibly could. And I was absolutely amazed at how far I got.

The pictures here are of the piece just before I started casting. I did three weeks of clean up work in class, and I actually brought this one home and worked on it for another 5 hours.

But what I got done in the one class was enough to base all the rest of the work on. Which was great. It showed that I'm getting to a point where I can worked quickly from the model and get enough down to be able to finish it from memory.

But, but you say, the sculpture has hair, and you said she was bald. Yes well, I like to do hair. One of the funnest things is coming up with a hair style.

Although I like this hair very much, it wasn't my first choice. I had a style in mind that was reminiscent of the hair style Guay had the first time I saw her. Unfortunately it was going to be too time consuming to produce. This year I am only able to make the fall session of classes. This means I must get to at least the completed mold stage, or the piece is lost.

Last week I started molding. There are two weeks left. It shouldn't be a problem getting the mold done now. There is some question as to whether I can get the clay out. But that's not a serious problem. It just means it will be very heavy to take home, and I'm going to have quite a mess in my bath.

When will I get it cast? Probably fall 2007. When will it be finished? Probably spring 2008.

Sculpture: Guay Seated

2006-11-15T07:13:00.000-05:00

(October 2006)
All the models that have posed on the Sculpture class I take are awesome. It's hard work holding the same position for 3 hours and then return a week later and take the exact same pose for another 3 hours.

If all the models are the best, Guay is the best of the best. She is also in high demand so we rarely get here. In fact this is the first time I actually go to sculpt from her. The previous few times she was in I was stuck down at the other end making a mold.

Not only is she curved to fit a beautiful sculpture æsthetic she takes poses that are hard to hold. Usually involving twisting or arching the torso.

In the first two classes of a session we tend to do quick sketches rather then multi week posses. This is a sculpture that I did of Guay in an hour and a half. I'm very please with how much I managed to get done in that short amount of time.

Brains!

2006-11-01T07:00:00.000-05:00

Sculpture: Torso, Part 2

2006-07-19T21:51:00.000-04:00

(September 2005)
So after a clay sculpture is completed it must have a mold cast from it in order to make it in some way permanent. Unlike the Tile where it was made from a firing clay, most of the sculpture work I do is done in clay that is much like what you dig out of the ground. In the sculpture case it comes from a special mine in Kentucky, I think. But that just because it's a consistent quality.

Making the mold, then casting it is a involved process, and not a very artistic process. I'm going to try not to get into too much detail. In the end it's not all that exciting.

In this case the sculpture allowed for a one piece mold. This is the simplest case, and as the name suggest the mold only has one piece. The more complicated the shape, the more pieces you need for the mold.

The mold is made from simple plaster. It is layered on for strength, and finally a layer of burlap is applied to hold it all together. Once the mold is completed the final material is poured inside the mold and allowed to harden. In this case the mold is a waste mold, because the mold is destroyed in order to remove the sculpture from it.

In the picture above the piece has already been cast. Because this mold is so big it would be impossibly heavy to cast it solid. So instead I cast it as a shell. This sculpture is case in Densite, which is a plaster like material but it cures harder. To cast the shell I poured some Densite into the mold, then tipped the mold and allowed the densite to cover all the surfaces. I did this repeatedly until the entire inner surface of the mold was covered to a thickness between .5 and 1 cm thick. Over that I placed a layer of Fiberglas soaked in Densite, and for good measure I added a grid work of wire to hold everything together.

Getting the piece out of the mold is a matter of breaking the mold off the piece. This is done with a wooden hammer and chisel. In this case I was at the cottage and didn't have a wooden hammer, so instead I used a log. The wooden hammer is desirable over metal or rubber because of its rebound properties. It gives a much better feel for what is happening at the chisel blade. Metal hammers give to sharp a strike and rubber is too bouncy.

This mold came off quite easily. Because the sculpture was so smooth in many places large chunks of the mold just fall away after being struck.

This is also a very satisfying part of the process because you get to see the sculpture again for the first time in a long time. In this case about 6 months.

Finishing this piece involves sanding off the mold sheen and other imperfections. I didn't get to that till this summer.

Sculpture: Torso

2006-06-28T20:36:00.000-04:00

(March 2005)
This is the big project. Over the years of taking this coarse there have been several people who have consistently been there. One of them, Gill, always works big. Very big. To heavy to lift big. For a sense of scale his sculptures are topically life size in proportion. By comparison I topically work in a range of 1 to 1.5 feet in length for a full body. This means Gill rarely does the full pose. He usually concentrates on the torso.

I've always admired his work, and decided early in the year I wanted to try doing a pose really big. In the Winter session an opportunity presented itself with a perfect reclining pose. So I grabbed the biggest board I could, a large chunk of Styrofoam to help keep the weight down, a pile of clay, and lots of encouragement from the teacher and tech, and went big.

This sculpture is big, like Gills work. Unlike Gill I tend to be more realistic where he tends to abstract his works. The sculpture is about 80-90 percent life size to the model.

These pictures of the piece are after 3 classes with the model and 1 class of cleaning up. If you look at them in detail you will see the clay is covered in tool marks. This is from me working the surfaces to get the forms just right.

Ultimately I wanted the surfaces to be very smooth. The process of doing this takes a lot of time. It involves working the surface with a fine toothed saw blade and a sponge. Gradually working out all the tool marks and smoothing out the surface. This took another 2 or 3 classes.

These pictures are of the sculpture at the start of the last class I worked on the sculpture. It is fresh out the garbage bags we use to keep the clay from drying out between classes. The next week I started casting it. Almost all of that last class I spent working on the nipples. If you look closely here the nipples are surrounded by a swirl of tool marks. While this look often works, it doesn't work with when the rest of the sculpture is so realistic.

So that class I spent consulting with the teacher and the model that was posing in a different pose at that point, trying to figure out how to make the nipples look more realistic. I settled on a process of adding tiny bumps around the nipple and blending them in. This was a long and slow process but it yielded much better results then what is pictured above.

The other major difference is the rib cage and the clavicle bones have been toned down. The day school teacher dropped in one day, and I know him well from when he used to teach night school, and made a couple of simple comments. He is like that. You don't get praise from him. You do get excellent pointed criticism. Which is exactly the kind of thing you need when learning. He simply pointed out how harsh the lines of the ribs and clavicle were compared to the softness of the rest of the piece. He then left it to me to do what, if anything, I wanted to address it. This is the kind of thing you need when working on something of this nature. You're so close to it it's hard to see it as a whole. Once he mentioned it, I could see exactly what he was saying. So I took steps to soften these lines, and I think it helped a lot.

The next step in this piece is casting it. Unusually I have pictures of some of that process. However I will wait for another post to continue the description.

Sculpture: High Fired

2006-06-09T07:28:00.000-04:00

(March 2006)
Back to a sculpture from this year. I've posted this one earlier in it's clay form and bisque fired form. Now here it is after it's been high fired.

High firing is as the name suggest done at a much higher temperature. A special kiln is used for high firing. One of the things that happens in high firing is metals within the kiln will vaporize and condense on the pieces. Particularly iron oxides. This gives the pieces a warm glow after the firing. The clay also takes on more of a stone look then the very white crisp look after bisque firing. In this case I washed the piece in an oxide called rutile. This enhanced the natural oxide effect of high firing.

One other thing that occurred during high firing is two cracks formed. This was no surprising, I could see them forming in the bisque fired stage. They also correspond to places where I tried to join to blobs of clay after the clay had dried a little to much to be worked.

The cracks aren't serious, and don't pose a risk of propagating across the piece. They will make it a little weaker if dropped, but I'm not planning to do that intensionally.

Here are the four stages, clay, bisque fired, rutile applied and high fired.

Sculpture: Dancer

2006-05-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

s(December 2004)
It's been a while since I posted a sculpture.

This sculpture was started because I was board of sculpting guys. Through a unfortunate sequence of timing whenever I was in a position to sculpt from the model, the model was a guy, and I was getting tired of it. So I thought I'd try something different.

Around the sculpture studio there are a lot of pieces done by the day students. A lot of them are very good. And they get to do things that we don't get to do in the evening class. One of those things is carving. And I thought I'd like to give it a try.

To make things easier, then say carving stone, they make a box out of a special mix of materials. This makes for something that is easy to carve, but has the appearance of stone when finished. To make the blocks, they use a 2 liter juice container as a mold, mix together plaster, Densite and vermiculite. Vermiculite is a very soft stone material. The form they use for making the carving block is a lot like very small packing peanuts. It's also very light. The Densite and plaster are used to hold it all together. Densite is very similar to plaster it just cures harder. By mixing the three, about 2-1-1, you get about the right hardness for carving.

So after making two of these blocks, I needed something to carve. While it could be the model, the teacher didn't want to make a big deal out of me doing something different, so he suggested I make a maquette, to work from. Since I was doing Salsa dancing at that time, I decided to do a little dancer in the final position of a spin. I also decided to do a Japanese super deformed kind of look. Big head small body, simple forms.

The maquette above is quite small. The lead bars are to hold t up because it wasn't very stable, and it wasn't very well built. I think I slapped it together in less then an hour.

The next step was to start carving the block. This was a very interesting process. Very hard to get started. It's a tricky feeling, you know if you go too far you can't go back. But if you don't cut into the box, you'll never get anything out of it.

The block was interesting to cut. I use an old steak knife for most of my sculpting. It's a simple tool that works very well for me. This knife cut nicely into the box, so at at least that part of it was comfortable.

It's also tricky visualizing where things are within the box so you know where to cut. One of the suggestions the teacher had was draw each side of the sculpture on the sides of the box. Work your way around the block gradually cutting this pattern deeper and deeper. Another method is to cut to the deepest points, then work your way back out from those points. A combination of the two is probably the best.

Unfortunately something shiny must have crossed my path, because I never finished the carving. I do still have it, and I might finish it one day.

However I did go back to the maquette. Seeing as I didn't finish the carving I decided to cast the maquette so I'd at least have a reference if I went back to the casting.

So I spent a class cleaning up the maquette, and a few classes making the mold. I then prepared and cast it in Densite. This took me to the spring of 2005. The class work on this peice spanned the gaps in working on another piece.

Over the summer I worked on sanding it. I spent a week at a cottage with a bunch of friends from work. I spent a good amount of my time there working on this sculpture and another one. Finally when classes started up again in the fall I took the sculpture back to class and added colour to it. So from start to finish it took about a year to complete.

I am very happy with this piece. But it has a lot of mix emotions for me. It was originally intended to be a gift for someone that is no longer part of my life. When I said above that I stopped the carving because something shiny crossed my path, that wasn't the truth. I will always cherish this peace as a reminder of the good times we had together. I may never finish the carving. It's unfinished form is rather symbolic too.

Condo: The Move is Complete

2006-04-24T19:46:00.000-04:00

I want to give a big thanks to Calum, John, and Jeremy for helping me move on Saturday. I couldn't have done it without your help.

I'd also like to thank Ken and Colleen for there help earlier in the week.

And I'd especially like to thank my parents for all the help and support they've given me from the day I expressed interest in the new place to helping me clean out old dump, they've been there.

So lets review the weekend.

I had reached the point of total exhaustion. I've been moving stuff over almost every day for the last two week. By the time Saturday rolled around I just couldn't deal with it any more. I couldn't think what went where or how to pack it or even how to carry it. Fortunately everyone did a great job of just picking up stuff and getting it over to the new place. All I did was babel a few incoherent thoughts and it all happened around me.

We did have a little fun too. Here's John and I ridding the couch down the elevator.

If you'd like to see the sequence of the Great Couch Toss it can be found on Calum's Blog. That was a very cathartic experience. That couch, was passed it's prime years ago. The black had faded to gray on the arms and the seat fabric was gone completely.

The cool thing is it only weighed about 35lb so it wasn't hard to lift into the bin. It's too bad I couldn't do the CityTV Christmas Tree Toss thing, 6 floor window and pyrotechnics, but heaving it over the side of the bin was quite satisfying none the less.

Another thing that was happening is people were joking about what strange things they'd find in the kitchen. It's the one area I hadn't managed to do much packing. I left my Mom to pack things up, but I know Jeremy and Calum helped out at times.

There where the typical things like, 15 year old bags of sugar, Jello in classic packaging, cans of questionably aged soup. And there were a few odd things too. Like a picture a framed picture of Wendy Messly that my friend Aair had given me years ago.

But the one really odd thing, which I had forgotten about was in a black garbage bag sitting above the cupboards. On the outside was a small label that had my name and "tues eve" written on it. In side was a board and two clay breasts sitting on it.

Even with context they're pretty odd.

But no-one Mentioned it specifically. I've got to assume John didn't see them because it's not like him to let a breasts go unmentioned.

Anyway, the explanation is somewhat obvious, they are from one of my sculptures. But I didn't do a sculpture of too disembodied breasts. These where actually part of a much larger sculpture I did last year. It's one I have not yet posted. It's almost a life size female torso, which I molded and cast. When cleaning out the casting the breasts popped out of the mold undamaged. Everyone in the class thought they looked perfect, and that I should keep them. In fact a few people wanted to take them if I wasn't going to keep them.

Well I wasn't really interested in keeping them, but I also wasn't comfortable with others taking them. So I invoked my artistic right to be selfish and I keep them. I took them home in a black garbage bag on a board from the class, put them on top of the kitchen cabinets and forgot about them.

Looking at them now I am amazed how well they dried out. Normally this kind of clay cracks and flakes off as it dries. But they are almost perfect.

I'm still not sure what to do with them. They are too hard to work with, they can't be made workable again, and they are too dusty to use as is. The will probably go back in the bag and back on top of my new kitchen cabinets only to be found and wondered about in another 15 years.

Condo: Elevator to Nowhere

2006-04-12T00:07:00.000-04:00

Well I've been doing a lot on the Condo of the last few days. However tonight was not fun. I got stuck in the elevator for about 10 minutes. In fact I got stuck in two elevators.

The first one descended a few floors then stopped. The doors wouldn't open and it didn't feel like it was moving. Eventually doors opened on the next floor. Not wanting to temp fate I got off and called another elevator. I was far to high in the building to walk the rest of the way down. Besides I had my trolley with me.

A different elevator arrived and I rode it down maybe another 5 floors before it stopped. I waited a couple of minutes to see if it would open up on he next floor. It didn't. So I decided to press the Call button. Apparently this calls an Alarm Service company. I had a rather frustrating time talking to the lady on the phone. I couldn't understand her well and I don't think she could her me very well even though I was yelling.

I eventually got through to her what building and what elevator I was in. She said she had to put me on hold briefly. So I was on hold for about 2 minutes, then there was a click from the speaker. I now suspect this was the phone hanging up.

All the time I'm sitting in the elevator it doesn't feel like it's moving at all. However the number changes and the elevator beeps about once a minute. I was about to try the call button again when the number hit ground and the doors opened. This was very surpassing since it didn't feel like it was moving at all.

I got off and went to the concierge to tell him what happened. He was very surprised because he is supposed to be contacted immediately when there is an elevator call, and he had not been called.

He said this had happened over the weekend but technitions had been in to work on them. He said he would check on what was happening and notify people in the morning.

I decided I did not want to risk those elevators again so I went out the doors, and took the parking elevator down as far as it would take me and then walked down the ramps the rest of the way.

So I'm back at the old home and I'm glad I'm not planning on going over there Tomorrow. Give them time to sort things out. I'm still a little freaked out. I'm not good in small places when I don't have control over when I can get out.

Anyway, here is a picture of the pool. It's not finished, but it looks nice.

Condo: Day Two

2006-04-08T23:17:00.000-04:00

Well today went much better. The property management had arranged for temporary keys for parking so when I arrived this morning I was able to get to my space. It's not a bad space either, although it's very deep in the building, P4. But it exit into a the out lane and it should be easy to back into. I remember my friend Jeff's parking space was 1km into the basement. I'll have to measure mine, I bet it's close.

I do for see one problem. Leaf games. Leaving or arriving when a game is on could be very slow as I must pass through public parking before getting to resident parking.

Now to the condo, I'm feeling much better to day. I got up there and I got to do work on the place. My parents came down from London to help out. I realize now the fact that the builder hadn't been in to clean up was probably a good thing. I would have had to clean everything in the place anyway, it's best if it's just done by the person who cares about it.

So I assumed all the appliances. The fridge was the most fun, and it's enormous. You could stash a couple of people in there. Given the amount I use my current fridge, I suspect there will be a lot of open space.

I vacuumed then wiped down most of the kitchen cupboards. After a brief laps where I was cleaning the floor first, I quickly remember, it's best to start at the top. The amount of dust and saw dust on things was incredible. But you really didn't notice it until you wiped it off because it was so evenly distributed.

Next I got to plug in the stove. Lots of fun plugging in that giant plug. But those things scare me too, so I threw the breaker before doing it.

The appliances are all black, and they look really nice now that all the dirt is washed off them.

My Dad worked on cleaning the baseboards, the balcony and the windows. You can now see out the windows. There is still a fair bit of paint on them in places. Paint was splattered on everything. Fortunately it came of easily in most cases. My mom worked on the bathroom, and it looks great too. She also brought down some nice towels which match the bathroom quite well. They also had a bamboo moniker on them, which is funny because I'm thinking of getting bamboo hardwood floors in a year or two.

finally, to end the day we went to IKEA to look around and pickup my bed. I was disappointed to learn IKEA didn't to the free dinner with $150 or more purchase, but we had a good dinner there anyway. After doing the wonder through we picked up the bed in the warehouse. It's interesting how a simple queen sized bed comes as 6 separate boxes and bags, spread over two different aisle and 3 different bins. The bed side table was one box in one bin.

Where I was feeling dread last night, now I'm looking forward to getting back there tomorrow to do more.

Pictures: first is the living room through to the balcony, second is bedroom window, third is bathroom, as if that wasn't obvious, and the forth, as I've been lead to understand, is the kitchen.

Condo: The View Part 2

2006-04-08T08:36:00.000-04:00

The previous shot of my view was a little more confined. This one gives a full 180 degree panorama. Unfortunately it was raining Friday when I took the picture, but it's still reasonably clear. I'll do another one in good weather, when we get some, which might be today.

Thank you to Calum for building the mosaic. My PC is down at the moment, haven't used it in like 3 months. The software he used, Autostitch, is currently only available for Windows.

Condo: Keys in Hand

2006-04-08T00:59:00.000-04:00

I got the keys to my condo today. Left work early to go over and collect them and look over the place. Unfortunately, all did not go well.

All week I've had mixed feelings. I want to be really excited, and everyone else wants me to be really excited, but I know if I let myself get too excited I'll be disappointed. And that's what happened today.

The reasons, well some are not entirely unexpected, and the others are frustrations that will pass. I will be very happy with my place. It's just not in a state where I can feel that way yet.

The first problem was with the keys, or lack of a parking garage key. It's kind of hard to do anything at your residence when you don't have a place to park. I had planned on moving a bunch of stuff over there tonight, but that was quashed by having no place to park. Apparently they ran out of FOBs for the resident parking. There is no way to access my spot without them. While the did make an effort to allow me to park on the ground level until Monday when they will have more FOBs, I'm not comfortable with the ability of the parking attendants and security to grasp this concept, and not tow my car. By Monday this will pass, but it has thrown a wrench in my plans.

Second, almost no work was done on my unit from the time of the inspection a week and a half ago till now. The only exception is they installed the closet doors in the bedroom. Unfortunately they installed three, when the contract calls for two, and they installed mirrored doors when the contract calls for white.

While the mirrors are interesting, I'm not really excited by the idea of having an entire wall mirrored. That's why I had it written into the contract that they be white.

Finally the place is really dirty. The inspector said there would be a cleaning crew come through before I took possession. There is just as much or more dust on every surface as there was during the inspection.

So now I've got to give the place a thorough cleaning, and their off the hook for the work. I can't wait around for them the come in and do it. I need to move stuff in and get setup to live there.

I hope this doesn't sound too negative. It's not all bad. It's going to be a great place once everything is finished.

Pictures to come.

Condo: The View

2006-03-31T07:40:00.000-05:00

I inspected my Condo on Wednesday. All went well. There were a few problems but that's to be expected. The closet doors in the bedroom were missing, the air vent above the stove wasn't fully boxed in and a few other minor things like scuffs on the wall.

The one thing that might be a bigger issue is a cable and a phone outlet were missing. I had ordered one for each section of wall. That way I wouldn't have to span a door ways to setup a TV anywhere I wanted. Unfortunately the cable outlet that's missing is right where I wanted to put my computers. The phone is less serious, mostly because I'm using the cell phone, but it's still a future consideration.

Fortunately there is a blank switch plate where the missing cable outlet should be. My hope is they just ran out of cable plates and put a blank one on temporarily.

I didn't get a chance to take many pictures, and most of the ones I did take are pretty dull, nothing but empty rooms. And of coarse I forgot to take a picture of the kitchen, the one room that looks like something. However I did get a shot of the view.

Sculpture: Tile, Bisque Fired

2006-03-28T22:08:00.000-05:00

(March 2006)
Today was the start of the Spring Session of the sculpture class and I got the Tile Sculpture back. Much to my relief it did not explode the kiln. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.

It's gone though the first stage of firing, called bisque firing. The next stage is called high firing. I'm assuming it called high firing because they take it to a higher temperature.

One thing you can do when high firing is add oxides to change the colour of the piece. A straight high firing will make this particular clay come out a gray stone colour. It also tends to pick up a reddish, orangish, brown tone from iron oxides in the clay and from surrounding pieces. However this effect tends to only happen to the most open areas of the sculpture.

So to even out this effect I added an oxide called rutile. Don't know exactly what it is, but it will give the piece a light reddish, orangish, brown tone. Or at least that's the plan. You never know what's really going to happen in a kiln.

The pictures show the raw bisque fired piece, in white, and with the rutile applied. The final picture is of the piece in the kiln. This is the smaller high fire kiln. It's big enough to sit in when it's empty. The bisque fire kiln is in the same room. That one is large enough you can walk into it.

Sculpture: Tile

2006-03-25T15:14:00.000-05:00

(March 2006)
I thought I'd post a new one for a change. This sculpture is different from the rest in that it was sculpted in a firing clay. This means to get the final piece it just needs to be kiln fired, instead of the long involved casting process with the other pieces I've done.

I sculpting it during the last class of the Winter session. It went off the drying room where it will be taken to the kiln for firing. So I eagerly await the start of the Spring session so I can see how it turns out.

There is a multi-step firing process involved. The first firing I believe is called a bisk firing. After this firing the piece will come back very white in colour. It can be left in this state, or it can be high fired. High firing will give the piece a more stone like look. More earthy yellow in tone. It will also pick up deposits of iron which cast an interesting shadow over the piece. The iron comes from the kiln it's self. The temperature is high enough that small amounts of it vapourise and then condense in on the piece.

Another thing you can do before the high firing is add surface finishes. I'm not sure what all the options are, but I've seen some of thenm, and you can get some interesting effects.

So an obvious question is, why don't we use a firing clay all the time? Well there are several reasons I can think of. The clay is a lot more expensive to work with and it more difficult to work with. It costs more to get, and it's harder to maintain. It must be kept clean of contaminants or it could explode during firing. It's also harder to work with. The grain of the clay is much larger, so it's harder to get detail into it. It dries faster, and doesn't soften up again easily. Finally you need to be very careful how put it together. Creating an air pocket in the clay could cause the piece to explode when fired.

Plus there's the poetry class, which makes full use of the kiln so there's rarely an opportunity for additional works to get fired. So it was a bit of a privilege to get to work with this clay and I fully enjoyed it.

The moment of truth will come in the next few weeks. Did I make any mistakes creating it that might cause it to come apart or even explode in the kiln. I worked with it a lot longer then I should have and it was getting pretty dry by the end. It's hard to add new clay when the old clay is almost dry. So it could turn out that these pictures are all I have of 6 classes worth of work.

Unlike all my other pieces that I've just decided to squish back into the bin rather then cast, the decision is not mine whether it survives. It could return to class this week and be given a hand full of rubble.

Sculpture: Roboman

2006-03-21T07:22:00.000-05:00

(May 2004)
This is about the mid point of the all male model trend. I believe I had just completed work on casting Man 2. This was the last three week pose of the school year. As I recall I didn't have much creative energy left. Sometime this leads to trying different things. This is a good example of that happening.

Because the school year was coming to an end there was no way to preserve this piece. Well not easily at anyway. So knowing it's just going to get squished gives you a little more freedom to just play with it. It also gives you little incentive to put effort into it. So the combination of those two factors resulted in this part robot man.

Had I had more time or interest in it I probably would have taken it to the half and half stage. I think it's an interesting idea. I might try it again sometime. I've like the cyborg / humanoid robot concept. It might be fun to carry that through to a completed piece.

Sculpture: Quick Reclining

2006-03-10T08:19:00.000-05:00

(January 2004)

Don't remember much about this one. I know I did it in one class, 3 hours. Compared to work I've done in the past, getting this far would have taken 3 classes. I'm still not very fast compared to some others I've seen though.

Condo: Almost Ready

2006-03-10T08:03:00.000-05:00

My new condo is almost ready. I take possession April 7. Here are a few pictures of the building from about month ago. The only visible difference from today is they've taken the construction elevators off the building.

The close up picture at the bottom is my actual balcony and bedroom window.

Work: Jeff's Last Day

2006-03-09T23:04:00.000-05:00

Jeff is a friend and coworker. We've worked together on projects on and off over the last 7 years I've been at the company, he's been there for 10.

Tomorrow is his last day. For most people I'm very sad when they leave. I know there is a good chance I may never see them again, or at least very rarely. Jeff has decided to go to China to learn mandarin. So while I don't expect I'll never see him again, it's not like he's going to be around.

Jeff hasn't enjoyed working at the company since the day I met him, my first day in the office. I think one of the first things he said was "I've got to get out of here." While I don't expect this is entirely true, it is mostly true. He is a very loyal and responsible person. He very carefully timed his departure to be at the end of a project cycle.

The difference with Jeff's departure over other people's departures is I'm very happy. When other people have left, they've basically gone to do the same job somewhere else. Jeff has not only quit a job he hasn't enjoyed, he's decided to pursue something he's talked about doing for a few years now.

It's an odd felling for me. I'm glad to see him go. And this feeling of happiness at his departure has overridden any feelings that I'll miss him.

All the best in China Jeff. I suspect I will miss you at some point, but right now I'm just glad to see you go.

Neill-Wycik, Giving Notice

2006-02-28T07:58:00.000-05:00

September 1988 was the first time I moved into Neill-Wycik Co-operative Collage Inc., as a place to stay while attending Ryerson. In November 1992 I moved from the student multi-units into a one bedroom apartment.

Today, after 17 year and 7 months in the building and 13 years and 4 months in my apartment, I am giving notice.

It's a very odd feeling knowing I'll no longer be living here in just a couple of months. Somedays I'm very excited about moving to my condo, other days I notice all the things I'll miss about this place. Overall I can't wait to get into my new place.

Sculpture: Man 2

2006-02-06T18:40:00.000-05:00

(November 2003)
Look Familiar? This is the second male standing pose I've done, and it looks a lot like the first one. Same model too, I think. It's rather stylized. The lines of the body are very exaggerated.

This one has a funny story, and it explains a bit of a problem with the piece. When the time with the model had finished it wasn't this far along. Much of the smoothing and accentuating of the lines I did in the next class. This meant I no longer had the model as a reference. Anyway I liked it enough that I wanted to keep it. I'd never cast a male figure before, so I figured it was about time. Casting from a standing armature posed some interesting technical challenges, and I decided to try casting it in cement. All my other pieces I've cast in Densite. But first I needed to finish cleaning up the piece.

The one thing I hadn't done when the model was there, was give him a penis. This brought about a big debate. Did the absence of a penis stand out such that it distracted from the rest of the piece. I kind of thought it did, so I wanted to add it. But I didn't want it to overwhelm the piece. Penises are hard this way.

So, I couldn' t use the model as reference, I didn't want a penis that stood out, and I really didn't want to get into all the details and other bits. It wasn't what I was going for, I just wanted enough that people wouldn't say, where is it. So I started with the little bit you see in these pictures.

The next class I had setup to do some final cleanup before going down to the other end of the class to start casting. A few women in the class wondered by, pointed and said, it's too small, it needs to be bigger. I wasn't really sure what to think, so I made it a little bigger.

Later another women was looking it over. She liked it a lot, but thought the penis was too small. So I made it bigger.

Later the original group came wondering back. They really liked how I had cleaned it up and smoothed it all out, but still said I should make it bigger.

So from this experience I learned, that it's never big enough, you just got to work with what you've got. But I also made it a little bigger.

Later I will post pictures of the completed casting. I still haven't got around to making a stand for it. I'd like to do that this summer. Then he and his small penis can stand out on my balcony for all to see.

Sculpture: Seated Man

2006-01-08T15:43:00.000-05:00

(November 2003)
This pose begins a long series of male poses. Most with the same model. I'm not fond of sculpting the male form. I'll be honest it doesn't hold much appeal for me. I don't mind doing one from time to time. It's good practice and there are striking differences in the male and female form. However this is the start of almost a year and a half of strictly male models.

This wasn't the fault of the school. Although they were bring in more male models then usual, it was mostly the result of bad timing on my part. I had to switch the night of the class I was taking twice. When I did it just happened to work out that the model was switching nights too. And then I chose to cast a piece and work on the Pony Tail. I happened to do this when female models where posing. It was all just bad timing.

Anyway, I do like this piece. I also like the pose. It's one of the most crunched up pose I've done. Because sculpture poses have to be held so long, it's rare for a model to take a pose that's in any way uncomfortable. Or at least to the extent that holding any pose for 3 hours is uncomfortable, they rarely do anything that increases the discomfort.

The one nice thing about male models is their musculature is much more obvious. This is one the good thing about sculpting the male form. You get a better idea what is under the skin. This helps when working on the softer female form.

As with most of the sculptures I've shown, this is not a complete composition. If I had decided to complete it there are several things I would have done to clean it up. For one the head would be less skeletal. I would have done something more detailed with the hands. In particular I would have figured out why I gave him 6 fingers on his left hand and a mitt for his right hand. Probably would made the lump he is sitting on into something too.

Movie: King Kong (2005)

2006-01-07T00:10:00.000-05:00

Pros:

Smashed a weather station.

Cons:

Mr. Smithers didn't get eaten.

Spoilers:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/12/05

Sculpture: On Her Side

2006-01-04T22:42:00.000-05:00

(October 2003)
I really like this pose. Had I sculpted it at a different time I probably would have kept it. But at this point the sculpture classes had just started up again and in the spring classes I had gone through the arduous task of casting the Pony Tail. I wanted to model, not work on casting again.

As you can see I had fun with texture in this one. This effect is created by a tool called a rake. It is basically a wire loop stuck into a wooden handle. A finer wire is coiled around the wire of the loop. As you drag the rake across the clay the fine wire rapping makes grooves in the clay.

It's a cool effect, because it allows you to make flowing lines around different forms in the body. This then accentuates curvatures, pulls and twists in the body. My tendency is to go for a very smooth look. I'm glad I tried something different here.

The legs are incomplete, I'm not sure why, probably a time constraint. I probably figured it looked better without them, then with what I had.

I know I slapped the hair on very quickly. I wanted to avoid the problems I had with Napping. I really, really like how this hair turned out. It still needs work to clean it up, and it's not giving proper coverage at the back of the head. But this would have been easily correctable.

But unfortunately this one went back to the clay bin.

Sculpture: Pony Tail

2006-01-01T19:02:00.000-05:00

(March 2003)
First to explain the irregularity in the completion dates for my sculptures. The coarse I'm taking with the Toronto Board of Education is offered three times a year, Fall, Winder, and Spring. The Coarse is 9 classes, three hours each. The usual setup is we work with three different models three classes each. So you might think this would result in a regular pattern of nine sculptures a year. But suddenly we've jump from May 2002 to March 2003, and there are a few other jumps like this. Some of this I can't explain, I've been taking the coarse very regular but I can't remember all the details anymore. I know I missed a fall class one year. This was probaibly fall 2002. Whenever I cast a piece that takes three to six classes to complete, so there's another big chunk of time. Finally I've got to assume I just didn't take pictures of a few of them. I wish I had. It's great reference going back and looking over my previous work.

Now on to the Pony Tail. This is another sculpture that I cast and took to completion. I'm very happy with this one. I put a lot of work into it. It's the first one where I really spent the time to address all the elements to make it a complete composition. It also took me a long time. Although these pictures where taken in March 2003. I actually finished work on the casting in Spring 2005. Now I didn't work on is solidly for all that time. But it was also no small task to complete.

The modeling of the head without hair was done in the three classes with the model. There is a fun story with this one. About halfway through the second class I was having a lot of trouble with the shape of the jaw. I couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. Richard McNeill, the teacher at this time, was doing his rounds looking at peoples work and giving them advice. When he came to me I said, I know there is something wrong, but I just can't figure out how to fix it. He asked if he touch the piece. I never have a problem with this. So he place his hands in a 'V' shape around the jaw and went squish. He pulled his hands away, and it was like wow, that one moved fixed everything. As impressed as I've gotten with my own abilities, I'm always amazed by the skills of people teaching us.

Part of the problem in this case is the fear of making a radical change. Once you reach a certain point, you don't want to make big changes, for fear they won't work and make things worse. It's a hard step to take, making a big change late in a project. But the majority of the time this works for the best. I think it's because you've made the decision to do what you think is best, and you know you can't go back on it, so you put in that extra effort to make it work. If you know it's not going to work if you do nothing, and fiddling about is not likely going to make it much better, you might as well take the chance and make the big change. You'll make it work in the end.

So now that I've made a philosophical point of some sort, back to the sculpture. The hair, as you might imagine, was a lot of work. I think it took me three classes to apply the hair, sculpt and smooth it. Yes this is another sculpture with very smooth hair.

This brings us to the truely radical alteration I made. In the previous Head sculpture the body was left largely unfinished. This sculpture looked much the same. I really didn't want to sculpt the body, because it wasn't the point of the piece. Richard then gave me the idea of cutting the body down into a pedestal. This would be a very radical move. I took a lot of self convincing to actually do it. But like the head, the body as it was, didn't add anything to the sculpture. It would be just as confusingly androgynous. So as I philosophized above, I took the plunge and cut huge chunks of clay from the sides of the sculpture. Completely removing the shoulders and angling down into the body.

It worked wonderfully. People understand it. It draws attention up into the detail of the head, rather then down into the lack of detail in the body. I've very happy Richard suggested doing this, and I'm very happy with myself for taking the plunge and radically changing what was an otherwise complete sculpture.

Happy New Year!

2006-01-01T18:58:00.000-05:00

Taking a brief break from posting sculpture pictures to wish everyone that visits my blog a Happy New Year.

Even if you don't visit my blog I'd like to wish you a Happy New Year.

Sculpture: Head Finished

2005-12-31T08:54:00.000-05:00

(May 2002)
Here is the Head sculpture posted earlier after it's was cast. I started an explanation of the casting process to go with this post. When I reached 2000 or so words and wasn't nearly all the way through I decided to stop and save it for another day. I also don't have any pictures of the process. It's just to messy and time sensitive to operate a camera while working on it. I really need someone else to take pictures while I do the work.

The quick rundown of the process is: The clay can't be fired, it's not formulated for that, so you must make a mold off it. A plaster waste mold is made around the clay. The mold is opened and the clay is removed. This destroys the original sculpture, but now you have a negative of it.

This sculpture was cast in a material called Densite. Densite is very much like plaster, it just cures harder and stronger. The mold is prepared for casting by coating the inside with Sunlight dish detergent. A cheap and effective mold release. Because Densite and plaster are similar materials they like to stick together. The mold release keeps them apart. The Densite is mixed up and poured into the mold. You have to wobble the mold around and tap on the sides to release any bubbles that may have formed while pouring the Densite. Then you let the mold sit while the Densite cures.

After it cures the cast sculpture can be removed from the mold. This is where the "waste" in waste mold comes in. The only way to get it out of the plaster mold is to break it out. So the plaster mold is chipped away from the sculpture. This is a fun step because it looks like you are carving a perfect sculpture out of stone.

Once released any finishing work can be performed on the sculpture. Densite is very white in it's natural form, but it also takes pigments well. When I looked at the piece I decided I wanted keep the hair the natural white colour. I also wanted to make it very smooth. To do this I sanded it. Then I sanded it some more. Then did some more sanding. And finally sanded it. This was done with progressively finer sand papers. I think I started with 100 grit dry paper and ended with 400 grit wet sanding. Finally a clear floor wax was used to seal the surface so it wouldn't pickup dirt.

The face and body I wanted to tint a kind of skin tone. To do this I mixed several different pigments together with linseed oil and paint thinner. The linseed oil helps to seal the Densite, and the paint thinner makes it, well thinner, so it's absorbed better. By making the pigment very light many layers needed to be applied to get the colouring. This has the effect of bringing out the natural flow lines in the Densite.

Densite is porous, but this porosity veries through the surface of the casting. By layering on the linseed oil and pigments the more porous areas attract more pigment then the less porous areas. This can give a natural stone look to the sculpture.

So with the two parts of the sculpture sealed this piece was done. My first permanent sculpture. I'm very happy with it, and I'm glad I waited for this one to be my first to cast.

Sculpture: Casting

2005-12-30T20:06:00.000-05:00

(May 2002)
As I said earlier this was the first sculpture I took through the casting process to make a finished and perminent piece. This pictures are of the final result. Getting here was a long and involved process. One day I would like to document it photographicly, but it's so messy it's impossible for me to do on my own. There is a recent sculpture that I managed to get some intermidieate stage photos from, so I'll post those as I get to that sculpture.

The previous post was of the sculpture as it appeared in November of 2001. This was from the last day of the fall class, and therefore the last day I had with the model. After taking the pictures I packed it up on garbage bags to keep the clay wet and stored it for the winter. The school is very good about letting us do this. The only time we can't store a peice we are working on is over the summer. Two months off, good time for a purge.

When the winter term started I started work on cleaning up this piece. If you look closesly at the previous picture you will notice a lot of scratch marks and cracks in the clay. Particulary in the hair. The hair I added in the last hour of the last class. It was a rush job. Although not realistic it does capture the look of the models hair style. I've come to like this soft yet chunky looking style of hair. It shows up a lot in future peices.

So I spent the first class cleanup all he marks and finishing up the hair. I had decided I wanted to do it very smooth so I spent a lot of time smoothing it out. I also cleaned up the markings on the back of the piece and touched up the face.

The one thing I didn't do, which would have made it a more complete peice, is address the body. I wasn't really interested in doing the body when the model was posing, and I didn't really have time for it either. What's there is really just there because it was needed to hold up the head. I thought about cutting it off, but I didn't want it to end up looking like a head on a pike. Untimately the process of casting it was driving me more then the desire to complete the look of the piece and the body remained unchanged from when I modeled it. This is somewhat unfortunate because it does tend to confuse people, particulary about she gender.

The casting process, as I've said a few times now is long, messy and a little tedious. Long and tedious I am very good at, messy I have a little trouble with.

The first step is to plan out the number of piece the mold needs to be. This is deturmined by the complexity of the piece, and the need to get the clay out of the finished mold. This piece required a two peice mold. Not recomened for a first casting, but the teacher and the technologist had seen me work for more then a year and knew it wouldn't be a problem for me.

To make a two peice mold you need to divided the sculpture in two. Preferably in equal halves. To do this you create a clay wall. The wall is made of strips of clay about one and half inches wide and half an inch thick. This wall is lightly attached to the sculpture. For this sculpture I built the wall up either side of the body, and over the sholders. It then turned slightly to follow up the sides of the neck, following the twist in the neck. Once it reached the hair I followned along the part between two sections of hair on each side. The wall then followed the hair up each side of the head until it met in the true part of her hair.

Finaly registration marks were made in the wall by taking a quarter and holowing out little dishes in the wall at regular intervals. When the model is complete, one peice with have dishs and the other will have matching bumps where the two halves come together. This makes sure it aligns properly when you bring the two halves together.

Now we come to the first stage of actaully making the mold. This stage is called the splash coat, and that is a very literal name. This is the messiest step of all, and with a two piece mold you need to do it four times.

The mold is made from plaster. Your basic plaster of paris. It cures resonably hard, but not so hard that you can't brake it away. The splash coat is done by mixing up some plaster and literaly spashing it on the sculpture when plaster mix is fresh and at it runniest. This isn't entirely a hap-hazard approch. You are looking to get full coverage of the first half of the sculpture. You are also trying to avoid creating bubbles. To ensure this doesn't happen you often need to blow the plaster into the cracks and crevases of the sculpture. This requirement became very clear when started applying plaster to the hair. The deep grooves I had created where quite difficult to fill evenly with plaster and avoid all bubbles. One bubble in this area would cause the whole groove to disappear. Because I was making a negative mold, these grooves become very thin walls in the negative mold. One bubble and the wall would fall appart easily.

After the first splash coat is finished you do a second splash coat. This ensures full coverage and also provides a layering effect in the plaster which adds strength to the image side of the mold.

Once the splash coats where finished the next batch of plaster is allowed to setup a little before applying. Basicaly you let it become the consistancy of butter. Using this thick plaster mix you fill in all the negative spaces in the mold, trying not to apply too much, but also smoothing out any sharp edges in the previous layers of plaster. For example the space under the chin had to be filled in and smooth out. Sharp changes in direction in the plaster mold create weak spots which could crack or break when the mold is opened to remove the clay.

Once mold is completed on one side of the sculpture, you get to do it all over again on the other side. Before starting the clay wall that was built for the first side is removed. This is where you see the dishes that were made into the clay wall appear a bumps in the plaster of the first half of the mold.

So the two halves of the mold don't stick together you put what is called a slip on the first half of the moded where the two peices will come together. In this case the slip is simply clay mixed with water untill it's quite runny and then it's painted on the plaster. Works remarkably well.

So at this point repeat pretty much everything I've said so far for the second half of the mold. If you find this explanation long and teedious, it's not nearly as bad as actaully doing the work. Cheer up we are about a quarter of the way through.

Once both half of the mold are complete, they need to be strengthend. To do this burlap is soaked in plaster and layered onto both halves of the mold. This is much like making a plaster cast on someones arm. Not that I've ever done that.

Through the whole process of building the mold you need to remember that it's eventualy got to come off the final peice. The more plaster you put on the more you have to take off. It's a delicate balance of trying to use just enough for the strenght you need without over doing it. You don't want to making the mold too heavy and difficult to remove or too weak that it doesn't survive long enought to complete the casting.

Wow this is taking a long time to explain, I hope you people now understand why I don't cast very many pieces.

At this point the mold is complete, but the clay is still inside. It took me two classes to get to this stage, it will take another class just to get the clay out.

This is where the original clay sculpture gets distroyed. To open up the mold the mold is placed in a bath of water an allowed to soak for a while. Then water is poored over the joint between the two halves of the mold and the halves are gradualy pried apart. There is usualy a "shluck" kind of sound when if finaly comes appart.

Now the two halves are separated but each half has a good chunk of clay in it. This stage has tought me that smooth sculptures are much easier to clean out of the mold then rough ones. Basical I spent the entire class gradualy picking the clay out of the mold. Sometimes it comes free in big chunks, sometimes you got pick out tiny piece after tiny piece. It's a no win situation too. If the clay is too wet it gets slimy and is hard to remove, if it's too dry it sticks in too well and can break delicate parts of the mold when removed.

Three classes and I have a clean mold. I'm thinking most of you probibly stopped at the pictures. "He he, look at the funny white hair, it so shinny and smooth"

Can I cast it now? Maybe I should have done a series of posts on the casting process. Yes but then I'd have to drag it out even more. And I'd get more critasism for not having pictures of the process. I hope you can see how having your hands constantly covered in plaster and clay is not condusive to operating a camera.

But the answer is no, I can't cast it yet. Because I chose to cast it in Densite, a gypsum cement, which is much like plaster, but cures much harder I needed to add a mold release. Similar materials like to stick together. Without a release to separate the two types of plaster you end up with a solid blob.

When building the mold I used a clay slip to separate the two halves of the mold. Although this would work it's not ideal. The clay will mix in with the very white densite and create a muddy surface on the final piece. So instead Sunlight dish deturgent is used. The school has used this for years. It's cheap and very effective, and washes off easily when the mold is opened. To prepare the mold three coats of Sunlight are used. First the mold is soaked in water so it's saturated with water. Then the first layer of Sunlight is added by rubbing it in with a brush. The brush is used very vergerously so the soap foams up. Once finished covering the entire inside of the mold you let it sit till all the soap is absorbed into the mold. Then you add two more coats by rubbing the Sunlight in with your fingers. Again waiting for it to be absorbed between layers.

The best time to cast the mold is just after the final layer of sunlight has absobed into the mold. The mold is closed and strapped together. Then a plaster soaked strip of burlap is wrapped around the mold to seal up the joint between each half of the mold. A big lump of clay is also kept handy to plug any leaks that might happen.

The Densite is mixed up the same way plaster is. In this case a very big batch was made to fill the entire mold. Although I didn't do this in this case, it often a good idea to do a skin coat before filling the entire mold. This is done by poring a small amount of Densite into the mold when it's reasonably thick and sloshing it around until it creates a thin skin on all the inner surfaces. You must be careful not to create any bubbles. This often creates a better finish because it ensures all the finer details are filled. However it can be a mixed blessing because if too much soap mixes in with the Densite as you are sloshing it around the skin layer won't bond to the rest of the Densite and chip off.

The rest of the Densite is poured into the mold. While the Densite is still liquidy you slosh the mold around in an effort to release all the bubbles. Tapping the side of the mold helps too. Densite cures a little more slowly then plaster, so usualy it's left over night.

If you are lucky you can soap and pour the mold in one class. The soaping take verying lenghts of time depending on the temperature and moisture content of the air in the class room. Sometimes it just doesn't want to soak in and takes forever, sometimes it takes 15 minutes a coat and you're ready to go in less then an hour.

So I believe at this point I was at the 4 three hour class mark in the casting process. At this point I basicaly have a large heavy blob of two types of plaster. Now I need to separate them. The type of mold I made for this is a waste mold. That's because it is lost, or wasted when you remove it. So now it's time get out the hammer an chisel and waste the mold.

At first this is great because you can wack away at the outer edges of the mold and knock of large chunks of plaster. As you get closer to the actaul peice you need to be a lot more carful. This is another time when a smooth sculpture makes a big difference. Large pieces of plaster often just fall away from the sculpture if it's smooth. When it's rough you could be picking the plaster way for weeks.

Am I almost done yet.

Once all the plaster if off it's time to start thinking finishing. For this piece I did something unusual. Usualy people just finish them in one colour. There are tons of example sculptures around the class and they are all have a single colour washed on them.

The raw Densite is very white in colour, equivelent to the colour of the hair. I really liked who stricking this made the hair and wanted to keep it that colour. The face and body I wanted to give more of a skin tone too.

To finish the hair first I sanded it. Then I sanded it again. Finaly I sanded it some more. Using progressively finer grits of sand paper I polished the hair very smooth. To preserve the natural white of the densite I then rubbed in some clear floor polish. This will prevent dirt and dust in the air from getting into the pores of Densite and dulling the brightness of the white.

On the body I mixed linsead oil and different coloured pigments to get the tone I wanted. I then brushed this on lightly in several layers. This allowed the oil to soak into the Densite. Densite is porous, but the degree of porousness is effected by a lot of things. Because our casting environment is far from controled the veryation in porocity in the Densite creates wonderful patterns in the final casting. Layering on the linsead oil highlights these patterns.

Sculpture: Napping

2005-12-18T08:59:00.000-05:00

(May 2002)
This and the previous sculpture are the first ones I kept. This one I worked on both meticulously and rushed. It's probably the first that I really attempted to make a complete composition out of. The problem is I ran out of time.

It was this term that the talk of shutting down the general interest program started. This was one of the reasons I cast the head sculpture and this piece. Unfortunately it also mean they weren't quite there as complete compositions. I really needed one more class then I had.

I'm quite pleased with the pose in this one, and I like how I contoured the base she is laying on. I think her proportions work much better then previous poses too. But I didn't finish the face, or get hair on her, and I did the socks and mittens thing with the feet and hands. This was the result of running out of time.

I had a great plan for hair. After doing the head sculpture I realized how much fun it is to come up with hair styles in clay. It also would have solved the mitten problem, because I was going to make it long and flowing so it would have covered the hands.

The biggest problem is the face. Although this was a female model the face currently looks very male. Now that it's more or less set in stone, it's not easy to change. This is one of the main reasons I don't display this one. It just doesn't look right. I'm hoping I can come up with a way to fix it. One idea is to sand down the face and give it the same sort of appearance as the hands and feet. But this takes away detail, that on it's own is not too bad. It's just not right for the piece.

So the cast version of this piece is now wrapped in a towel and is laying on the floor in the spare bedroom at my parents place. On day I hope to figure out something I can do with it. It needs something to make it displayable but I'm not sure what will make it look right.

Sculpture: Head

2005-12-06T19:59:00.000-05:00

(November 2001)

Soon I will stop saying this is the first ... I did, but this is the first head I've did. I really like doing heads, I hope to do more. My favorite part is making up hair for them. It's hard to do realistic hair in clay. Once you accept that fact you can have lots of fun making up hair. Which is what I did here.

The model for this was a very happy petite French girl about 23 years old. This shows I'm not good at representationalism. The people who have seen this one have very different reactions to it. Some think its an old woman, some think it's a young girl, others think its a boy. I think the last one stems from the fact I didn't finish the body enough to give clues to the female form.

This is the first sculpture I kept. It sits in my living room at the moment. In a future post I will show the finished piece and talk about how it was finished.

Sculpture: Take a Seat

2005-11-17T22:17:00.000-05:00

(October 2001)
It's been a while since I posted a sculpture. This is because I've kind of run out of things to say about them. So instead of talking about them I'm going to let the sculptures do the talking for a bit.

This is the first seated pose I ever did. I got quite a ways with this one. Had I had more time I might have even kept it. I like the sense of a slouch in her posture, and the look of weight in the way she's sunk into the ottoman.

Sculpture: Lie Back and Relax

2005-11-09T07:40:00.000-05:00

(November 2000)
This is my third sculpture, and the first reclining pose I've ever done. Looking back at it I'm quite impressed with what I was able to do. I'm currently working on a similar pose. I think with the same model as this one. I'm not doing nearly as well. I'm out of practice, for a lot of reasons that will become clear in subsequent posts.

The teacher says start with a good base of clay and try and model the surface the model is lying on be for modeling the model. (The use of the term model for what the model is and does and what the arts does can get very confusing, but that's way it's done.) In this case I definitely made a good base. I wish I had done that with my current piece. But more about that when the time comes.

If you look closely at the pictures you will notice that the board I am working on is warped. It didn't start out that way, but it gradually happened over the three classes we had with the model. It made for an interesting problem. Each week I returned to the piece it had a big crack right through the centre. She got split at the belly button. This was definitely annoying, but it did help improve the arch in her back.

One of the problems with this piece is the proportions. The arms and legs are a little shore and they end in hands and feet that are way too small. A good measure of the size of your hand is that is will cover your face.

The part that I like about this piece is how it flows over the base. I think this worked quite well. I also like that I managed to get all the bits in. A little more clean up and this would have been a good candidate for casting.

20,000

2005-11-07T19:59:00.000-05:00

My Honda Element just turned 20,000. I was out at the Hobby Show this weekend and as I left the show I realized I was 9 km from rolling 20,000. Rather then head out on the highway I decided to just drive the streets, then stop at 20,000 and take a picture. Then I realized I was probably within range of Calum's place. I thought it's always fun to have a goal and Calum is one of the few people I know that would get a kick out this. So, I set out for his place.

To make what is really rather a short story longer, I missed the turn on to Martin Grove and had to head down Kipling instead. I knew how to get back on track, but I had to consider two things. I needed to get over to Calum's, but if I wasn't going to make it, I need to be within 1 km of finding a safe place to stop and take a picture.

Once I made it to Eglinton I knew for sure I was running short. I also knew there would be precious few places to stop along Eglinton, so I continued along Kipling. From my experiences driving with Calum I knew there was another street though a residential area I could cut back towards his place.

I turned right on Princess Margaret just as the odometer turned 20,000. A this point I knew I had blown it. There was no way to make it to Calum's. I also knew if I hadn't missed the turn on Marten Grove I would have been spot on when I arrived in his driveway. Instead I had to stop at the first cross street. I parked the car under the street sign so I could get a good picture.

Up until this point there had been no traffic at all in the area. In fact I sat in the car for quite a bit preparing the camera and taking a picture of the dash. Then I go to get out. What is it about drivers, a car is pulled over at the side of the road with it's four ways on and they line up behind it. Granted I was at the stop sign, but come on, it couldn't be clearer I wasn't going anywhere.

I got out and waved people around me. After I cleared all the cars from around me I managed to snap a few pictures before the next batch of cars showed up. And really this was a quiet neighbourhood, and I was on a side street, off a side street. Everyone came out of the wood work at once. Once I got back in and drove off, I didn't see another car till I got back to highway.

My car is now 20,000 km old. I finished the drive to Calum's to confirm I was only 1 km from my goal. Then I drove home.

On a historical note I did the same thing when the Element turned 5,000 km. I was on my way home to London, looked down at the odometer and realized I was a few kilometers from rolling 5,000. I pull off the 401 at Towerline Road in Woodstock just as it rolled 5,000. I was able to pull off to the side of the road right by the road sign. Funny enough no-one got confused by me being there.

Reach for the Top

2005-11-04T13:30:00.000-05:00

I went down to check on my condo today. They reached the top floor a few weeks ago, but I haven't had a chance to take pictures till now. There is still some structure for that needs to be completed on the top, mechanical rooms and architectural elements. It great to see the building at it's full height and wow is it big. My current building is 22 stories, my new one is 40.

Because the days are so much shorter now, I had to walk over at lunch to get the pictures. It gave me a good idea how long the walk will be what it will be like. It's definitely a shorter walk then my current walk to work. It's also going to be a very different walk. The one way I can go will be like walking down the side of a hiway, with all the noise and speeding cars and trucks. This is do to the fact I'll be walking down the side of a hiway. The other way is through a upscale area of downtown with lots of small shops and several theatres used for concerts, plays, operas and ballet. It's also just gone through a revitalization by the city, so new sidewalks, roads, trees, flowers, EST. I wonder which way I'll be walking every morning?

If you look closely at the upper right picture you can see two construction works on my balcony. Actually it isn't my balcony, but it's close. The balcony and the window to the left of it comprise my condo. Those are going to be some damn big windows to cover.

The bottom left picture shows the hiway I mensioned earlier. It's a great design. Jack it four stories in the air so you can put another hiway underneath it. I'm fairly high up in the building so I'm hoping the noise won't be too bad. But currently I live on a major route for ambulances heading to the downtown hospitals, so I am used to the noises of the city.

The final picture is of the building from work. It was a great day when it first peaked over the top of the other downtown buildings.

Formula One from Space

2005-11-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

What does a Formula One fan do in the off season? Well here's what I did when I was board one day and I started playing with Google Maps.

The following is the 2006 schedule as seen from Space. I managed to find all but the three newest tracks. The oldest of which, Sakhir Bahrain, is still newer then most of Google's data. For these three I positioned the map near where I think the track will be, or at least on the nearest city. In the case of Bahrain the country is so small I just focused on the whole thing.

12/03/2006	Bahrain	Sakhir - kind of
19/03/2006	Malaysia	Sepang
02/04/2006	Australia	Melbourne
23/04/2006	San Marino	Imola
07/05/2006	Europe	Nurburgring
14/05/2006	Spain	Barcelona
28/05/2006	Monaco	Monaco
11/06/2006	Great-Britain	Silverstone
25/06/2006	Canada	Montreal
02/07/2006	USA	Indianapolis
16/07/2006	France	Magny-Cours
30/07/2006	Germany	Hockenheim
06/08/2006	Hungary	Hungaroring
27/08/2006	Turkey	Istanbul - sort of
10/09/2006	Italy	Monza
17/09/2006	Belgium	Spa-Francorchamps
01/10/2006	Japan	Suzuka
08/10/2006	China	Shanghai - NW of here
22/10/2006	Brazil	Interlagos

Sculpture: Man

2005-10-23T15:30:00.000-04:00

(November 2000)
Although this blog is intended to be about my life in general, I've had requests to post pictures of my sculptures. So things are going to be a little sculpture heavy for the at first.

This sculpture is my second one. You can pretty quickly tell I got further with it then I did on my first one. You can also tell I stuck to the rule of working the core before working the appendages and fiddley bits. I hope you can tell that this was a male model even though he lacks some fiddley bits.

This holding off on the fiddley bits, as it were, would come back to haunt me in a later piece.

I don't remember much about this pose, but it was the second standing pose in a row. Seeing as I was new to the class I assumed all we did was standing posses. As time has passed I've come to realize that it's rare to get a standing pose. Models generally don't like to do them, and the armatures are time consuming and difficult to maintain. For these reasons the day school art program gets priority use of them.

Personally I think it helped a lot to get to do standing posses as my first two poses. It's the only kind of pose were you get to see all around the body. It really helped me learn the forms of the body.

A fun story from this class, which is mixed gender, about half and half, was the women's reaction to the model. The previous model was female, and almost all the women in the class complained the male model was harder to sculpt. I felt this too, but didn't want to express it at the time because certain assumptions about my reasons for stating that would likely be made.

But in my opinion it's very true. The male form is much more difficult. The lines are a lot harsher. Forms don't flow as smoothy. The male body has a much courser appearance. I'm glad the women in the class agreed with me. Also, I have to say, for a variety of reasons, I don't find the male form very interesting.

This is another model were I took the pictures, then scraped the clay off the armature and placed it back in the bins. I think there are at least two more to go before I actually made a permanent one.

Sculpture: First

2005-10-18T15:53:00.000-04:00

(October 2000)
Many people know that I've been taking a sculpture coarse for the last few years. Actually I think I'm starting the 6th year. Anyway I've been taking a sculpture coarse through the Toronto District School Boards continuing education general interest program for the last few years. Few people have seen what I've done or know much about the coarse and what I get to create there.

So I thought I'd post a few pictures of different "Works" I've done over the years and describe the different processes involved. I also hope to show progress in my abilities. I think I've improved quite a bit and I'm quite happy with a lot of what I've done.

So with this entry I'm going to start at the beginning and describe the first piece I worked on.

So the first time I took the course was Fall 2000. I'd been wanting to take an art course for a long time, and sculpture sounded very interesting. Although I had done some in my high school art class, I'd never worked with a live model.

The first class was very intimidating. I had no idea what I was doing. All the teacher said at first was, here's a stand, here's an armature, here's the clay. Then a women got up on the small round stage in the middle of the room, drops her robe, and we all start squishing clay on to our armatures. A very odd position to be in for a person who had not been around many/any naked people up to this point in their life.

A little ways into the class the teacher comes out and gives a little more instruction. When I think back I'm surprised how literally I took the teachers instructions. Basically he said, concentrate on the body, don't worry about the limbs, they will come with time. Work on the forms of the body, see how surfaces flow, try to reproduce the volumes. So I concentrated on the body.

The pictures are of the final stage I reached with this sculpture. As you can see it has no arms or legs and only a rudimentary head that's more then a little too small. Also for a sculpture of a woman it has surprising lack of breast. This is because the teacher pointed out, the breast sit on top of the body, don't put them on until the underlying structure is correct.

It took three, three hour classes to get to this point. I'm a bit faster now. I can usually get the breast on by the second class.

I don't know why, but I had no thoughts of wanting a piece to take home with me. After taking these pictures I took all the clay off the armature and returned it to the clay bins. I look at new comers to the class now and most rush to try and get all the details in and want to cast their first piece. I find your skill increases quickly at first in these classes. Saving your first piece is ultimately a discouraging process. It takes a lot of time, and is a very mechanical process. I'm very glad I spent the time to learn the art before spending the time needed to cast a piece. But I'll discuss that process at another time.

This piece of mine wasn't worth keeping, but there was a lot of learning in it. Taking a few pictures of it was the best way of preserving it.

I thought I wasn't going to write so much.

Moving on up...

2005-10-17T23:14:00.000-04:00

So I bought a condo in the Spring. I also made the silly move of buying one that wasn't built yet. Silly because now I have to wait... and wait... and wait... for it to finish. So if you can't tell I'm currently in the waiting phase.

Here is a picture of the construction. It is a little old, August 9, 2005. I need to get over there and take some new ones. In this picture they are forming the 33rd floor. About a week ago they reached the 40th floor, the top of the building. My floor is about half way up.

The second picture is what my kitchen will look like. Well actualy it's the mirror image of what my kitchen will look like. Plus I probibly won't have plastic fruit on the counter.

There were only three choices of cabinate colours and this is by far my favorite. The others were a strange olive green in an almost carbon fiber pattern, and the final one was a light blue. I imagine much of the building will be done in the wood grain colour.

The unit I'm getting is a one bedroom plus den that's approximately 700 square feet. The original floor plan had 2 full bathrooms on it. I couldn't imagine why I'd need two full baths. I'm not planning to have guests over so often that sharing a bathroom will be a problem.

So I had the second bathroom removed from the plan. It makes the den much larger, and much more usefull. I also moved the door of the remaining bathroom to the living room wall so it is no longer an on suite, and I moved the bedroom door so the closet could be extended the full width of the bedroom.

I think this will work out well for me. It gives me a lot of useable space in the den, which will be a workroom kind of area. It will allow me to have normal livingroom and bedroom.

But as I said in the beginning, I still have to wait. However I did get my first movin date of early Spring. I'm not expecting that to hold, but it's encouraging.

In the Beginning...

2005-10-16T20:21:00.000-04:00

I tend to be a very private person. I've wrestled with the idea of writing a blog for a long time. I like the idea have having a place to record the things I do. I like the idea of having a place where I can direct friends to let them know what I'm up to. I'm a little more tentative about having a completely public display of the events of my life.

I tend not to be much of a writer, I'm more of a visual person. I know some people can write essays every day about the events of their day. If I did that, every day would be an essay about how it took me the whole day to write the essay for that day. I do however enjoy pictures, and I hope to do much of my writing with pictures.

So the blog entries to follow will be most likely not be my most intimate moments. They will be very filtered. If you want to know the intimate details, then talk to me in person, I prefer that form or comunication anyway.

So on to my second blog entry...