MINI-QUESTOR PROJECT PART 1

As a part of a larger movie project I'd like to do, I need a scaled-down version of my Questor robot. He needs to fit inside the UFO I made a while back. Also he needs to be articulated so he can move around and do things.

To start, I got a small bubblegum prize container for the helmet. I scaled photos of the Questor robot so when I printed it, the helmet was the same size as the bubblegum prize container.

The main base to which all things connect on this mini robot will be his chest, so that's what I started with. I carved a piece of mahogany to match the size of my printed Questor pic.

Next I carved some shoulder pieces going off the print for the right scale. I scooped out the insides with that round U-shaped chisel you see in the photo.


To firmly attach the shoulder pieces to the body, the connecting contours need to tightly match each other. The best sanding block I could use to match the body contour is the body itself. I wrapped a piece of sand paper around the body, and then . . .

. . . Holding the sand paper in place, I sanded the joining edge of the shoulder pieces until they snugged up against the body.

After removing the sand paper the shoulder pieces match up very nicely.

That's it for Day 1. Robot creation continues tomorrow.

UPSCALE HIGH-QUALITY FILM

Here's a film for the most refined and discerningly cultured tastes. Theater-lovers be warned, when you watch it, your emotions will surely bubble over. You will experience joy, fear, sadness, and possibly tears. Men, don't let your ladies see you cry. Ladies, grab a tissue and get cozy. Prepare to be mesmerized. I doubt anything has ever tugged on your heartstrings like this will.

I just recently dug this out of a forgotten drawer. I'm pretty sure I was in grade school when I made it. I hope.

MIDNIGHT CRUISE

I worked on this a while back, at the same time I did this one, but it's been backgroundless until now. Happy Halloween.
I wondered if it was too colorful to be spooky so I tried it in sepia tone.

And also in black and white.
Of the three I think I like the sepia tone version the best. I guess. It mostly depends on what it would be used for. If I were wanting it to look like an old movie poster, the color version would be out for sure.

I think the sepia and black and white versions might need a little tweaking so the monster's head isn't as close to the background color. The implied shape is there, but a little shadowing at the edge of the forehead would be a good idea.

CHILDREN'S STORY ILLUSTRATION

This was an illustration for some kid's book by River Bend Publishing (or something like that.) I made it about 15 years ago. According to the deal I was supposed to get a copy of the book but never did. I'm finding out that's standard practice when there's nothing in it for them to send a copy.

The drawing is a cutaway view of a farm house with a big family doing whatever they're doing. I like to think this house has been through an earthquake or a tornado, and the roof was destroyed, but the dad was so lazy he just left it.

HIPPYCAT ALBUM COVER

I like drawing faces like these with both eyes on one side of the head. It would never work in 3 dimensions, but for some reason as a 2D picture, brains accept it. There's not really a band named HippyCat. I just did it for fun and maybe to stick in my portfolio. Now if there really is a gang of musicians out there who want to call themselves HippyCat and they need an album cover which says Time For To Kill, I will sell this image cheap!

FATHER TEACHES KID

This kid learns patience, how save money, and spew/aim techniques.

HALLOWEEN CHARACTERS AND OTHER STUFF

Some more 60s style doodles.

SMUDGE

When you draw over black ink with a green highlighter marker, the tip gets all dirty. Sometimes if I care enough about it, I'll wipe the highlighter tip on some paper to clean it off. This particular green wipe-off smudge looked almost like it could be something. I added doodads to the smudge, and TADA! An illustration not much better than a smudge. Oh well.

HALLOWEEN FOR DOGS

My dog hates anything on her head. Weird huh? After I put it on her she moped and acted insulted and embarrassed, like it was an apparatus designed to humiliate. When I looked away, only for a moment, it was torn to tiny pieces. I at least got a few photos of it before it was gone.

GRAFFITI GENIUS

I don't much care for the new graffiti-art craze everyone is into right now. Any time I pick up an art magazine it's full of photos of graffiti which is now considered art. In my opinion most of it is awful. THIS, on the other hand, I love.

He put periods after each "HA" which, in my opinion, lessens the power of each HA. This graffiti tells a story too. Some guy was hurt by some gal, and now the gal is having who-knows-what-kind-of-trouble, and the guy is so ecstatic about it, he forgets to check his spelling. More than anything else he wants her to know she is worse off without him. For him to still be checking up on her and learning the news of her latest trouble means he still secretly cares for her. I suspect he'd probably take her back if she was willing. I wonder if he had tears in his eyes when he wrote this.

OVERWEIGHT SATURATION POINT

Once my stomach becomes large enough, I won't be able to reach my food. This is my diet technique. I will eat until I can't reach anything else. They when I can't eat anymore, weight loss will occur.

HALLOWEEN COLORING CONTEST

No, I'm not running a contest myself, but a few years back they had one at my job for the workers' kids. I was asked to make a drawing for the kids to color, and it needed to pertain to the United Way. Originally the hand was severed with visible bones and muscle, but that version was considered tasteless by the big dogs, so this is what my final version looked like.

If you aren't familiar with the United Way, the original logo is in the lower right hand corner of this drawing. It's sideways but you can get the basic idea.

PHOTOS

Your guess is as good as mine


imitation RoboCop

EYE HEART U

Nobody ever gets this joke but I feel like it's worthy of showing. Maybe if I redrew it the meaning would be more clear. It's supposed to say "Eye Heart U." Does it work?

HALLOWEEN MONSTERS

1960s-style monsters like you'd find on cereal boxes and stuff like that. I used the vampire on Drac-U-Snax a while back. Notice how his teeth point up or down from picture to picture for no apparent reason. I guess I like him better with the upward teeth.

MY MEDICINE CABINET

Happy Halloween

HALLOWEEN HANDS

Spooky fingers

BAT PENDANT

Happy Halloween month!


I dug an envelope out of the trash and cut out half a bat shape at the folded edge, so when I opened the paper fold I had the whole bat. I used some wire to make chain loops to hang it. I found a necklace chain in a parking lot a few years ago so I used it too. The only thing I actually bought was a package of fake red jewels of various sizes.


The bat shape was traced onto a thin piece of Butternut. Butternut is very soft; nearing the realm of Balsa wood, but not quite. That made it really quick to carve.

The way to carve a bat is simple: cut off everything that's not a bat, and then the bat will be all that's left. That bat was always in this wood; I just removed the parts he was encased in.

One thing about carving soft wood: You have to have razor-sharp chisels and knives or the blade will tear through the wood rather than cut it, leaving a crummy rough surface.


I painted it all black first, and then dry-brushed it with silver paint, and glued on the fake jewels and it was mostly done. I put an eye screw into his head, and made 2 links with wire, and VOILA!


Carving wood is not much different than carving clay. The only thing you need to watch is grain direction. As long as you go with the grain you will never have splits or tear-outs. There's really only one direction that will give you fits.


I think of grain direction as pages in an open book. If I were to rake my fingernail along the edge of the pages in a downward direction, the pages would remain as they are. If I did the same thing in an upward direction all the pages would separate and split apart.


If you are unsure of the grain direction, carve a little bit and see if it begins to split. If not, keep going! If it does start to split, stop and go the other way.

CD DISK ILLUSTRATION

A friend of mine made an album and needed something to put on the cd. This is what I made for him.

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.