Crow head model

Crow head - shaped chicken wire with xmas-decoration baubles for eyes, skinned with silver gaffer tape
Positive model to be used as a forma over which to apply papier mâché.
November 2011

Head for a pantomime goose costume - part 1

Agreed to make some costumes for pantomime.
Trying to make several bird heads, starting with a goose. A quick while on Google images and I found some great goose shots. First thing is to copy out and draw them a few times. This helps fix the shapes in the brain.





Once the picture is in the head, drew a quick final rough largish sketch to work from.The beak is the most important piece, as it is the defining shape of the bird head (birds' heads are pretty much all the same shape, except for the beak)





 To create the beak, used some soft builder's mineral insulation. This is much the same as Oasis, the green stuff used in flower arranging 

Started by roughing out the block in outline form







With a carving knife (my trusty 12" ham slicer), sliced out the detail of the beak shape.






Once shaped, a bit of light sanding got rid of the visible cut marks from the knife blade







With final details carved and finished - ta da - one beak, shown against the rough sketch design. 

Head needs a controller

The remote control automata reading lamp head needs a suitably daft controller.
It uses a playstation 2 analog joystick as the input device,

but this needs something more anatomical to skin it with. It has been suggested a hand would be rather ironically appropriate. It should look like this, but match the MDF finish of the head

image from wpclipart.com

Arduino workshop

Have recently been in Atlanta at a great workshop run museum multimedia techies.
Here we hacked together 4 arduiono projects in about 3 hours

A prototype theramin. the tone rate changed, but didn't quite get the pitch to work

A light show controlled by changes in ambient light

Slide the glass game using proximity detectors

There was also a Flash animated fish in a Flash fishtank controlled by proximity detectors

3-d printing

This table is pretty nifty...













And is actually just printed out using a rather cool 3-d printer