DEAD SPIDER-MAN

Since Spider-Man is all spidery on the inside, when he finally dies it will probably look like this.

BEAT CATS

ELEPHANT RIDE

Here are some more pictures from Thailand. My nephew Gary and I got to go on an elephant ride. We walked to a dock and the elephant came up beside and waited for us to hop on. The seat was a little creaky and rickety for my tastes but it hadn't killed anyone yet (that I saw while I was there.) The entire seat contraption was held down by a single skinny rope which wrapped under the elephant's front legs.



A driver got on with us. He instructed us to scoot to one side so the seat was better balanced and wouldn't fall off. Gulp. I tried to act calm about what he just told me, but it was slightly unsettling. After we headed out into the jungle area, the driver hopped off and was gone! He let us go on our own.

Watch your step.

It's a strange feeling to be up on top of a massive animal with no way to steer or stop. The elephant strolled anywhere it felt like going. It walked down into a gully to eat some leaves and I thought we were gonna fall off, but the rope held. We stayed as balanced as possible so the seat never rolled around under the elephant's belly dropping us out into the trampling zone.


The elephant was as nice as you could hope for and I did enjoy it.

LOST TREASURES OF THE GOODWILL

Most of the time it's a wash when I go to the Goodwill, but it's on the way home from work so I go ahead and stop in. Sometimes I get lucky and find stuff like this for 25 cents. It was broken but when I unscrewed it I saw there was just a disconnected gizmo. I put it back where it was supposed to be, and loaded batteries and it worked again.

He walks, turns his head back and forth, his arms move and he lights up all over. There's a little rolling picture of a space scene in his chest, and he speaks and makes laserblast noises. He says "I am a Super-Fighter. Drop it! Don't move!"
Pretty good for a quarter.

Watch the video:

THE SMALL MEDIUM LARGE GANG

This is a team of little bean-like characters. When a situation arises they assess it and decide whether the situation would be best handled by Small, Medium, or Large, and then that one handles it.

If there's a hole one of them needs to fit into, and it's very small, then the little one does it.

If they need weight to hold something down, then the big one does it.

There's probably never a situation in which only the Medium guy would be best to handle it, but that might be funny. Maybe he's troubled mentally by feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness because of it.

In a story like this you would assume in the end, some major catastrophe would come up meaning death for everyone, and ONLY the Medium guy could handle it, thus proving to himself he is worthy.

I think in my story though, I'd rather have that situation come up and he attempts to take care of it, but he realizes he's TOO medium-sized to do any good. Then everyone dies. If he were either just a tad bigger, or smaller, he could have had success.

After this happens the Medium guy is so distraught he decides to kill himself. He tries to chop his head off by standing under spinning airplane blades but he's too short to reach. He tries to jump out a window and he's too big to fit through. He tries to use a gun but he's too little to lift it. He finds out he has too much body mass for the bottle of poison he drank to kill him. His neck is too small for a noose. His head is too big to fit into an electrical socket. etc...

Then he decides to give up on the suicide and go ahead and live. As he decides this a bundle of newspapers is thrown from a truck, hitting him in the back of the neck and killing him. The headline on the newspapers says GUY NEEDED TO STEER ROCKET AND SAVE THE PLANET! MEDIUM-SIZED GUY REQUIRED.

If it were a comic book it would probably only last one issue.

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE HLUK

Yes, that's "Hluk," pronounced hhhhhhLUHHK! It's a little difficult to say but if you start by hacking up a wad of phlegm, you are halfway there.

MANIPULATIN' PHOTOS

My friend was having a zombie-themed food drive, so I manipulated this old poster into something more appropriate for the event. They wanted it to have a blank box so they could hand write different info as needed.

HERE'S THE ALTERED PICTURE

HERE'S THE ORIGINAL

YAAA!

I made up a riddle:
HOW DOES AN IDIOT WASH HIS HAIR?


Answer:
ACTUALLY I CAN'T TELL YOU THE ANSWER, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW, IT SHOULD BE WRITTEN ON THE INNER THE RIM OF YOUR TOILET BOWL.



My clean city.

BULL ON BASS

A lady wrote a story about farm animals who play music. This was an unused design.

DORK BOY

I found this buried in a pile of drawings. I don't know what it means but it looks like it was important.

THE CREATURE COMES BACK

MEAN PRANK IDEA #2:

Here's another time-waster, slap-in-the-face movie prank designed to punish the viewer and use up 1 1/2 hours of his/her life.

In this movie, The screen will be black at first, then the white-letter credits will start, along with droning spooky music. The credits should have the works: producer, director, writer, production designer, casting director, director of photography,costuming, special effects, voice coach, etc....

Then this title card will slam onto the screen with a standard horror movie musical sting:

As the title card fades out, it fades back into a stationary shot of a boring, plain old door.

A creature just kind of strolls up and says , "See ya" and walks through the door and shuts it behind him.

Then the actual prank begins. A long and miserable 1 1/2 hours pass while the camera doesn't budge from the door and nothing ever happens. I guess there WOULD be one thing happening: the drone of a slow, unnerving and moody musical score.

Then at the end of the movie, after 1 1/2 horrible hours have passed, the door opens and the creature comes back in and says, "I'm back."

Then the picture fades to black and this pops up.

Then the credits roll.

Again, as with the prank idea in the last post, the goal would be to see if someone was willing to sit through the entire movie waiting for something to happen. I suspect at the 3 minute mark most people would grab their remotes and either skip to the end, or fling them at the tv screen in disgust.

I have a friend who sells old out-of-print movies at flea markets. He says even though people have never heard of a movie they will buy it based on the box cover. If this had a worthy dvd box cover I guess it would sell as well as anything else.

CEMETERY OF THE DEAD

I thought of a mean prank:

Make a movie called "Cemetery of the Dead." Film a cemetery for 1 1/2 hours with a stationary camera, and add a spooky soundtrack. The film should be in black and white. Other than maybe trees rustling or birds flying through, nothing happens for the entire 1 1/2 hours since they're dead. At the end of the movie fade to black and roll the credits, which are the names of the people on all the tombstones.

I wonder how long someone would watch until they realize nothing is ever gonna happen since it's a cemetery of the dead.

Here's an example title card with spooky letters.

Here's one with more traditional 60s style letters.

Now that I've given away my prank idea I won't be able to trick the 4 people who read my blog.

THAILAND'S UNGLAMOROUS CIGARETTES

A while back I got to take a trip to Thailand. One of the things most memorable to me was the was they made cigarettes out to be shameful, filthy and evil. On tv, any time someone was smoking in a movie, the cigarette was blurred out. When I went to the store I noticed the packaging.


Instead of having fancy logos and glamorous camels and cowboys on the packages, they had pictures of cancer victims. I snapped these quick and blurry photos before the store clerk told me no pictures allowed.

On each package was a picture of something like a rotted tongue, a man on a breathing machine, a man with no chin, an arm with sores all over it (??), exposed throat guts, etc... All of it was nauseating to look at. Not a pretty or cool image in the whole load.
The word VOGUE seems so out of place.

BI_CLOPS ROUGH SKETCH

Before I do a painting, I like to work out the colors ahead of time. I didn't do this in the beginning and my success rate was about 50/50. When things turned out good it was accidental. Even though it seems like double the work, it saves me lots of headaches and frustrations in the future.

This is a rough pencil sketch I scanned and quickly colored in a photo-manipulatin' program. These colors are all on different layers so I can alter the HUE, SATURATION, and BRIGHTNESS with the slider tools until find a set of colors I'm happy with.


I guess most people may already know this, but if anyone doesn't:

HUE = which color. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple?
SATURATION = the range between gray-scale and full color
BRIGHTNESS = how dark or light

When I have each color on a separate layer, I can start by making everything the same color. Or I don't have to. It doesn't really matter which color I start with since they all get manipulated anyway. With those 3 sliders you can get literally any color in the world.

When I do the actual painting I know my paints won't be able to exactly immitate the glowingly radiant brightness of computer monitor colors, but it gets me going in the right direction. It takes out all the guess work and mistake cover-upping.

You can rarely go wrong by intentionally altering colors in an unnatural way to achieve a color scheme. Even though skin isn't purple in real life it looks better being purple for this particular color scheme. There's some deeper color scheme info HERE.

THE DEAD GHOST

Cover for a book I will make if I get some free time. It shouldn't take much more work. Since this ghost is dead nothing ever happens.

LARDY LOUIS

My goal was to make something disgusting. After I finished I asked myself why my goal is never to make something I can sell. Why? Because it's fun!

24K GOLD PIG NECKLACE

I saw this in a jewelry store in Hong Kong. Has there ever been anything more worthy of being cast in 24K gold? We've only got just so much gold on the Earth and then it'll all be used up. Stop wasting it on boring old wedding rings! Use it for worthy unusual stuff like this! Just look at it. It is a stunningly beautiful large mama pig with several suckling pigs dangling off her by means of solid gold chain links. What woman would not want this around her neck at some highfalutin dinner party? I wanted to get it for Mei but it was several thousands of dollars. She'd have to sleep in it to get our money's worth.

Sadly I didn't get it. I do have this photo of it though. When I think about it, all I'd ever do with the real one is look at it. I can look at a photo of it just the same.

SEWERCIDE

This hippo is literally going to crap his brains out.

DRAFTING ILLUSTRATION

I forgot what this was for exactly but someone needed it for a presentation they were doing. There were 3 drawings showing the phases of drafting through the years. The 1st was a monk using weird old medieval tools, like stretching strings and plum-bobs to get straight lines. The 2nd was this drawing of a guy using a T-square and triangles, and the 3rd was a guy using the computer.

FISH-EATING BEAR EATING FISH

I can post a step-by-step of this one later. I'm not real happy with the grass but I don't know if anyone will be looking at the grass (Although who can avoid it now that I've mentioned it.)

After I finished this painting I used a watered down amber color and brushed over the entire thing. That makes it look antique, and unifies all the colors. I've only done this trick a few times, but it improved the results of each painting I've tried it on.

If you try this wash-trick be sure to allow your original painting to dry over night first. That way if you don't like the results of amber wash, you can lightly wipe off just that layer with a damp paper towel and you won't affect the actual painting underneath.

CONNECT-THE-DOTS PUZZLE FOR TODDLERS

I realize connect-the-dots puzzles are for kids, and realize that means they shouldn't be overly complicated, BUT as a kid I remember being extremely frustrated when I'd get one with no mystery to it. Afterwards I was left with a feeling of no accomplishment, and wondering if there was some deeper mystery I wasn't seeing.

SWEET and SOUR and BOOM

I invented a new weapon. Instead of a BOOMERANG, it's a called a BOMBERANG. You have to throw it and run, because when it comes back it will explode at it's point of origin. Maybe a box of bomberangs could be "accidentally" lost in enemy territory. I can think of 10 or 12 uses right off the bat. If someone is catching up to you in an important bicycle race, FLING! If you are driving on the road and notice an annoying tailgator, FLING! Approaching bear? FLING!

Well, maybe I can't think of 10 or 12 uses, but that's just right off the bat.

MAKE A UFO

If you've been following this blog you may recall me mentioning I wanted to make a movie. I want to make a retro 50s-style movie with corny robots and laser pistols and UFOs and stuff like that. This is another prop I needed to complete this project.
Photo simulation of this UFO zooming over New York City

I started out with a Christmas ornament bubble you can buy at a craft store for about $3. I kept one half as it was, and sliced the inner ring off the other half using a bandsaw. I'll glue that ring down onto the UFO to serve as a holder for the bubble dome on the top of the UFO. By doing this the dome can be removable.


I bought some plastic plates at Target in the dollar section. This particular plate came in a set of 2 for $1, which made me happy seeing as how I needed 2. I spent a lot of weeks looking around in the stores for a plate with a convex shape, and it's more difficult to find than you would think. Most plates have a reversing curve in them which works great when you want to eat off them, but it's totally wrong for UFO builders. It's pretty rude of them to only build plates for their own selfish needs.

I traced off the bubble so I knew how much space I had, and cut a hole through the plate smaller than the mark I made to leave myself some room to glue.

The wooden piece is to hold the bubble ring, and the large hole is for the alien to sit, and the smaller hole is for the ON/OFF switch. I roughed up the 2 connecting surfaces and epoxied the wooden piece onto the plate.


I used Krylon Fusion silver paint to paint the plates. Fusion paint bonds with plastic. Other paints will eventually crack and flake off. Might as well make it to last. I masked off the bubble ring so it would still be clear. Later I will screw it together and the screws will be visible, so I painted them too since they were black. In this photo they are sticking into a piece of cardboard to hold them upright.


This disk is the inner ring which goes between the upper and lower plates. It's just barely larger than the diameter of the plates. It's made of MDF scrap I found at work.I could have used wood instead but MDF paints up slicker with no grains showing through. I drilled 10 large evenly spaced access holes around the edge of the disk. Then IN the edge, I drilled small holes for LED lights to pass through. The little holes connect to the larger access holes in the surface.

I painted the edge silver and the middle black since it would show. There is a threaded bolt hammered into the center. This will be used to screw the alien in place. Originally it was centered but later I realized the alien needs to sit back off-center in the cockpit bubble so I filled in that hole and put in a new one. In the LED holes I put little LED holders I got at Radio Shack. At first I was going to just glue the LEDs in place but this is better in case I need to replace lights in the future. The little pieces of wood glued onto the top make a battery pocket.


With the smallest brush I had (and still not quite small enough) I painted various buttons and dials on the dashboard. The large red button in the center (see arrow) is an actual working button. It will turn on the LEDs. This button stays on until it's pushed a 2nd time to turn it off. The throttle sticks and levers are made with sewing pins and toothpicks.


I twisted wires onto 10 green LEDs to lengthen them. It looks like a big rat's nest of wires but that's just because I was sloppy. I connected one hunk of wires to the switch in the dashboard, and the other hunk to the battery. All the LEDs were poked into the holes in the MDF disk. Then I screwed the upper plate onto the disk.


I used large tacks for the feet. I didn't want the UFO to sit directly on the painted plate and get scuffed up. I made small pre-bored blocks of wood and glued them to the inside of the plate to help hold the tacks in place.


Almost done! I screwed the bottom plate in place, and TA-DA! It's done, and it works! YEEHA! To turn it on you open the bubble dome and click the red button on the dashboard, and then put the bubble dome back in place. In the last picture you can see I added little fake buttons to even out the screw spacing around the edge. Later I'll be making a little alien to drive it. The alien will be a scale version of my Questor robot.

THE COOLEST INCENSE BURNER IN THE WORLD

This was one of the coolest things I found in China. His feet are hinged so he opens up. You put an incense cone in the little opening, and close it back up. There's a tiny chimney hole going up through his head so the smoke comes out his mouth.



ACTION!

The music came from www.incompetech.com. That Incompetech guy records music and gives it away for free. I don't know what's wrong with him! He has tons of soundtrack style music separated into mood catagories, like Action, Aggresive, Eerie, Intense, Humor, Epic, Calm, Love, etc... It's great if you want to put little (or big) videos together.

DANCY McGEE

This started as a curvy squiggle on a piece of paper, and then became the centerline for a twisty figure. I colored it on the computer and eventually made a fake album cover for him. After I got the album cover finished I halfway think it would be better if I removed him from it, leaving just the words with the rocket and the moon.

PIZZA SHOP MASCOT

Would you buy pizza from this man?