More Toys

This year my nephews made it easy for me to make them toys for Christmas. At Thanksgiving, my six-year-old nephew pulled me aside and let me know with great earnestness that he did not have nearly enough Greeks and Trojans to have a proper war. So that was easy, another score of Greeks and Trojans and he was taken care of.

          My eleven-year-old nephew had been asking me lots of questions about Medieval catapults and siege-engines. I made him a working model of a Trebuchet, complete with several different length throwing arms and slings. He had a delightful time out on their porch flinging things at other things (It is worth pointing out that the Greeks and Trojans make terrific targets).

          My niece provided me with more of a challenge. Whenever I put out feelers about what she might want for Christmas, she was very vague in her responses. Without much to go on, I fell back on two reliable interests; she loves horses, and bears (see the whole bear thing post). She also likes to work on things, rather than just play with them, so what I came up with was this: a traditional, horse-drawn caravan, driven by, and occupied by bears.

I put my efforts into the caravan itself, the bears, and the horse and carriage tack, leaving much of the interior details unfinished. Instead of finishing out the interior, I gave her a box of raw materials to complete the bear caravan to her own design. The round top of the caravan slides off so that it is easy to get at the inside. She was already planning what she was going to do with it, including more bears, on Christmas day.

Celtic Wheelhouse #3

If you are interested in more about the wheelhouse and you have a television, and you have cable, then you might be interested in a segment of a show that will be airing on January 16th on HGTV. The series is called; “Look what I Did”, and the episode shown on that day is supposed to have a segment on the wheelhouse, which they call a “Celtic Cottage”. I gather the segment actually aired last weekend, but I did not know it was going to be on, so I missed it, and can’t tell if you if it is worth watching or not.
          I can tell you that when the film crew came to do the shoot (more than a year ago) we  had a lot of fun and they spent a day filming for, what I gather, is a five-minute segment. The whole experience was a little strange, and I agreed to it because they were coming to do a segment on Peter’s Tree House (see tree house posts) and they wanted to do another segment from the same general region. I can also tell you that I saw the segment on the tree house, and it was pretty good; a little campy, but good.
          If this is of interest, you can go to the HGTV web site to find out about local listings.

Update: HGTV has shifted the time and date this episode will be aired, It now shows that it will air on January 11, 2007 at 6:00 pm. (this post was updated January 4, 2007) 

Functional Sculpture

When I wrote about the wooden computer, I spoke about functional sculpture. Another example of this is the opening mechanism, and the doorstop, at the Celtic Wheelhouse featured in another post.
        Originally, the counterweight for the door opening mechanism was just a piece of maple chord wood. I quickly tired of looking at this, and it was too heavy any way, so I decided to carve it into the form of a gnome hanging on to the door opening rope for dear life. However, due to the large mass of the door, once it started opening it was hard to stop and the door opened too far. This was stressing the door hinges that I had made on the forge out of soft iron. Eventually they would break from the constant overextension. What I needed was some kind of doorstop that would limit how far the door opened and absorb the kinetic energy of the opening door. This doorstop would also have to be clearly visible in a space lit only by oil lamps and firelight otherwise many stubbed toes would result.
        I decided to turn the gnome into part of a tableau that would present itself every time the door opened. I put together a three-foot high sculpture of a dragon to act as a doorstop. It was large enough so that it was hard to miss, even in the dark.  The tail of the dragon, when struck by the opening door, folded and absorbed the impact. The folding tail of the dragon is also attached, by an internal mechanism, to the dragon’s jaws. When the door opens, the gnome descends towards the dragon; the opening door strikes the dragon’s tail, which folds absorbing the impact of the opening door, and in turn opens the dragon’s jaws just as the gnome reaches a position over the open jaws. This little drama unfolds each time the door opens.

 

Drawing

I think that some of the best creative solutions come out of challenge. I know that as an illustrator, some of my most inspired work comes from assignments that seem impossible.  As a technical illustrator for a medical journal, I find there are a number of assignments that present predictable challenges. Drawing a specific type of injury for example, can require a lot of research before it is even possible to start the illustration. Then, I might need to make several versions in order to produce one that meets the needs of a specific article. The assignments that really make me stop and think, however, are those that have to illustrate how something in the body works; for example, “draw me a knee” is easy, “draw me how a knee works” is a lot harder. Furthermore, if you are looking for a challenge: draw me Malaria.
        I appreciate the life drawing, and anatomy classes, that I took in college, and I appreciate the discipline I learned in architectural drawing classes. The best artistic workout I get though is to spread out paper on the floor and have a child tell me what to draw and to have the child draw with me. Talk about changing your perspective. I love that young children have not learned conventional ways to represent the world and are open to new ways to relate and convey how they see. A young child will also present you with new perspectives. Another aspect of drawing with children is the absolute truthful response you will get to your drawings. I have had some demanding art teachers but it takes a five year old to make a comment like, “No. That’s too serious. Do it again”.

You can check out my children’s book by clicking here.
You can check out the tree house book I illustrated by checking here.

The Wooden Computer

I have always loved sculpture that fills a second function. A piece that works as sculpture, but that does something else too has an added element of surprise. My wooden computer is an example of what I mean.
         This is a piece that I made a little more than a decade ago, at a time when what I needed was a better way to organize my desk space. What I set out to make was a sort of file holder; something with places to sort, and store, the flotsam, and jetsam that covered my desk. I thought it would be fun to make something to meet my organizational needs and play up the impression I sometime make that I am a Luddite. Thus the wooden computer was born.

         The front of the monitor opens and has three shelves, the “A” drive, “B” drive, and “C” drive. The keyboard opens and has pens and pencils in it, and the mouse just sits there projecting attitude.

         The wood computer still sits on my desk, and still works, in fact it has never crashed. Like most technology that has never failed, I tend to forget about it and take it for granted. At least, that is until someone new stops in to the office, at some point the visitor will notice the wooden computer, fun ensues, and I am reminded of why I made it in the first place.

First Snow

 It snowed last night. As I walked through the woods this morning, the wolf loping along by my side in the new white covering, I thought about how much I enjoy the run up to the winter holidays.
            I associate this time of year with the pleasure of making things for others. I think this started when I was very small. My parents encouraged me to make Christmas cards to give to all the other children in my classes at school. I still remember those first cards, drawn on the multi-layered stencil for a hand cranked mimeograph machine. My father cranking the handle of the machine, the “clack, clack, clack”, as the drum went round and round. The heady smell of the mimeograph fluid, the purple ink, and the slightly damp feel of the paper as it came out of the machine. The sense of having made something worth sharing duplicated with each rotation of the drum.
            I still make my own cards. Although forty years have passed and my options for printing cards are more flexible than the old mimeo-stencil; the process of coming up with an image to celebrate the season is the same.
            I love this time of year, and it snowed last night.

The Mouse House: another toy blog

When my niece was quite small, she wanted a dollhouse but was not old enough yet to inherit the elegant, and rather delicate, dollhouse that the grandfather I never knew built for my mother. I built the Mouse House as a sort of fill-in-the-gap toy, to play with until she was old enough for a real dollhouse.
      The premise for the mouse house was Miss. Mouse; a three inch tall stuffed mouse, who needed a place to live. The idea was that I could make the mouse house out of an actual tree stump and make it much more rugged than a conventional dollhouse. After finding, and cutting, and drying, a stump that was the right size, and approximate shape, I set about cutting the stump in half vertically. This is when I discovered that the maple stump I had harvested was actually a rock-maple stump. When I got the stump cut in half, I began to hollow out the insides of the two halves to make the rooms of Miss. Mouse’s new home. The idea was that one-half of the stump-house would be glued to a solid base; the other would swing out on a large hinge so that the house could be opened in order to get to the rooms inside. Hollowing out the stump took some time with big gouges and chisels, but the simple and sculptural interior was just what Miss. Mouse needed. I had chosen a tree stump that had some wonderful natural clefts in it. As I hollowed out the two halves of the stump, I cut through the back of these clefts in several places to make irregular openings. By cutting these openings, I was able to make two places for small, hinged, doors. I filled other irregular openings with pieces of plexi-glass cut to fit the individual openings and glued in with epoxy to make windows.
      The furnishings for the mouse house were made from matchboxes, thimbles, acorn tops, and empty thread spools. I cut small cedar shingles to glue onto the roof of the house, and painted the base.
      The tree trunk that makes up the mouse house has cusped slightly over the years, but is otherwise intact, and has survived a lot of play. My niece has now inherited the dollhouse that her great-grandfather made, yet the mouse house remains a popular, and well played with, toy. In fact (this is a sensitive subject, and is not a topic for discussion with my niece and her siblings,) we are on our second Miss. Mouse, as the first one wore out.

The mouse house:

The inside of the mouse house with Miss. Mouse on the second floor: