ALL ART BURNS

My loose plans to start a design and fabrication startup have turned into a ref’s orders.

“Game on”, as they say.

A sea change at work has made me remember it’s good to get off the ship while it’s in the harbor and I did. I’m still going to look around for a nice gig at someone else’s firm, but while I’m doing that I’m also going to be putting pencil to paper, soldering, printing, lasering, and welding.

What makes me feel good about this is how quickly some work has shown up. It’s not a for-a-living level of work, but it will be great additions to my portfolio and CV, and lead to more work.

For you digifab types, I’m also cranking up my lasersaur, reprap/makerbot, and general digifab hacking at the nerd blog.

One of the things the docs warned me about in rehab was that post bonking my head I might perceive reality a bit differently than before. I’ve noticed a few minor kinetic bits here and there, but they’re mostly related to two weeks of being in bed and losing some of my muscles. (I can play catch and walk backwards already, not sure I could do that before the fall…)

However, after bonking my head in the basement I also found the latest Jameco catalog, and something about it just isn’t right.

I had an unexpected health issue pop up that put me in the hospital for a couple of weeks. I took a lot of paper notes and am trying to get them all into email/blog posts.

sigh.

test post using blogjet — http://blogjet.com

I took a break from the insane day job and home remodeling to do a weekend photo workshop with Scott Church. He’s brilliant at photographing people, does everything from babies and kids to birthdays to weddings and traditional glamor/pinup. A friend of mine from design school agreed to go along as my model/collaborator and we made some art that we’re both quite proud of. She brought a lot of costumes, I brought a lot of props, and while everyone else was shooting naked/pinup/whatever we were shooting comic book panels. The full set is here.

This was two light sources — the sun and a fill flash, no Photoshop involved — Scott explained how to set this up in about an hour of live demonstration. (And yes, that really is a Gerber Mark II. :-):

Natural light from one window and not much else. And no, it’s not real. It’s a $10 prop from eBay with an edge duller than most butter knives:

One thing I really enjoyed about working with Scott is that he made us take lots of test photos, some of them came out as good as the “real” photos. Here’s one where I was trying to balance natural light from outside with light from a lamp: