Lunacon 2009

I'm participating in the art show for Lunacon 2009. The convention is March 20-22 in the Hilton Rye Town in Rye New York. It will have some boxes and books. I also thought I would put up some pictures of the recent big pieces.

Cryptic ConFusion

I just sent out my January show. I'm going to have stuff in the art show at Cryptic ConFusion in Troy, MI January 23-25.  Other then that I had a studio flood I'm still waiting to find out if the welder was destroyed. I thought I would also post a few shots of some of the new boxes. I have some really good shots of the work from the Fur, Fins, and Feathers show but I'm have a problem with the colors on the web so I will have to get that worked out and post those later.

We just finished Windycon. I think next year I will be doing mostly mail in cons. I will update this with upcoming cons we will be mailing into. The Fur, Fins and Feathers show is going on in Urbana now.

Things have been hectic lately I should really post more often. Shortly after my last post I made a mimic box to be given to Jeff of Jeff's Gameblog for his birthday. If you are unfamiliar with a mimic it is a classic D&D monster. Here is a picture from the monster manual. 

I put a little mouth and eye on the inside. I actually came up with a not bad method of making fish like teeth. It is a little bit time consuming but looks fairly convincing. You take translucent sculpey make your teeth, bake it then coat it in many, many layers of a clear varnish to build up a thick clear layer. 
Here is the mimic box fighting with Stuart's cat Kamali. Both parties were unharmed.

After the mimic box, I moved and had to pull apart the studio for about a month and a half.  The new studio is nice, though smaller. I've already gotten it fairly cluttered. The dragon is at around 225 hours and heading to 3 or 4 hundred. I'm also going to be doing a couple of pieces to benefit the exotic feline rescue I mentioned in the last post. I may have the first one at the next convention, and with any luck the dragon as well. I have a couple of shows underway in November. At Cinema Gallery in Urbana I'm going to be participating in the "Fur, Fins, and Feathers" show. Also, in November I will have a table at Windycon. Grace will not be participating in Windycon, as she will have just moved around that time. I will likely have some of her stuff at the table so if you are looking for her work you may still want to stop by. 

I've started the pieces for the "Fur, Fins, and Feathers" show. They will be the first two of a series of four figures with slightly animalistic features. For the vaguely bird based performer figure I thought the best finish would be a red crackle raku glaze. This is the first I've done home raku (I've done it at the university many times) so I needed to pick up some supplies. I did not have tongs to remove the hot pieces so I had to improvise; I ended up getting this giant wrench.

Here is the wrench with a normal wrench for scale. It must weigh ten pounds, I thought it would easily stand up to the 1900-degree temperatures it would need to during the Raku process. It did quite well and did not heat up much at all. They looked at me very oddly at Farm and Fleet when I picked this up. I had also gotten a large bag of pine bedding intended for horses and two sets of welding gloves for the people helping. The cashier looked at us with a look that said, "I don't know what you have in mind but it is a bad idea".  

     The firing actually went quite well.  The house did not burn down and no one was injured. If you are not familiar with raku I will explain. What we did was fire the kiln to cone 04, over 1900 degrees, then turn it off at the height of the firing cycle. Then I pulled the glowing molten pieces out with the "tongs" and threw them into a metal trashcan full of pine bedding which burst into flame on contact. Stuart and Jenn helped with the hot kiln lid and batting down the fire with trash can lid so that it would be a very fast process. It's bad for the pieces to cool to rapidly and might cause them to crack.
Here are a couple of the bits of the figure that were pulled out yesterday. I'm still sifting all of the burnt pine bedding. I think that I will have to do more of this in the future it is one of my favorite types of firings.

Exotic Feline Rescue Center

This weekend Stuart and I went to the Exotic Feline Rescue Center near Terra Haute IN. I highly recommend it if you like big cats.  These cats seem much happier and more active then other captive cats I have seen. The admission is 10 dollars and well worth it. They have about 200 cats onsite, most of them are tigers and lions, and a little over half of them are in the area visitors are allowed in.  The bobcat pictured above was very interested in people and followed us around the outside of the cage for quite a while.

I would have like to have gotten some better puma pictures but most of the pumas were crashed out in their boxes or eating at the time. I did hear one purring loudly though. I'm thinking of sculpting one soon, so it would have been nice to get some reference shots.

The center actually runs on very small budget around 300,000 a year. It was kind of amazing what they could do with it. I suspect they spend a lot of time scavenging materials given all of the large enclosures they had built.
They had quite a few groups of lions, apparently motorcycles trick lions into roaring. Every time a motorcycle passed the place several of the prides would start roaring. We had it happen twice while we were there.
This tiger may be Herman, before he was fed he was pissy and charged at us. I can say it was the first time I'd ever been charged by a 600 lb tiger.  It is hard to get an idea of scale but that thing he is eating I'm reasonably sure was a front quarter of a  cow if that gives you an idea. 

Duckon

We recently got back from Duckon.  There were some very entertaining activities at the Con such as the singing Tesla coils and a birds of prey presentation. The eagle owl was very impressive, and big. As for the singing Tesla coils here is a video from last year when they only had one. This year there were two and a guy in a metal suit.

On a weird note I also had my first theft/very discounted sale at the show. From what I can tell someone hit the booth at night while the dealers room was closed and left with most of my cute cast stone vampire bats. The same person or perhaps someone else left $10 in one of my small boxes. They may have also taken a platypus. I didn't really notice until this morning when one of my roommates wanted one of the brown bats for watching the cat, and I could not find any of them. So, I did inventory and noticed an odd pattern. 

The dragon had an accident involving a cat and a hot room. I'm going to have to perform surgery to get the armature back into place, fortunately I did not lose or damage the head. I should be posting about the small cast animals and other new things soon.  Also, I will be attempting to do the Convergence (the small sci fi con not the giant goth con) artshow. I'm also entering the lottery for the Windycon dealers room. Grace will not be doing Convergence.

Duckon!

This is Grace - you mostly hear from Angela on this blog, since I maintain my own at http://gracedpalmer.livejournal.com.

However, I thought you might all want to know that we'll be vending at Duckon starting tomorrow evening. We'll have eyeball boxes, cute animals of all descriptions, and a whole lot of weird. Hope to see you there!