May
14
2012
I finished installing my show for the 2012 Artomatic in Crystal City. I am happy with most of the work, I got really stressed the final weekend because I had to finish making about 12 of the door knockers in the last weekend. I wasn’t able to be as creative with the painting because I wanted to have one rusty one, one silver one, and one copper one for each design. So that one left one each for the creative designs.
But I really learned a lot in the process, I learned that if I’m going to get complicated with the painting I should probably paint them first and then glue them on. I learned that I should probably test the hanging mechanism before I get to the show. I also learned that paint drys out if you don’t use it for 2 years.
As much as I can relax a little from creating these guys every free minute I have I can’t really take too much time off. I need to have some ready because I think people are going to want custom colors and I’m going to be selling ‘blanks’ so that other artists can design their own. Which is fine with me because I really like the construction part better anyway. That would free me up to create more sculptures and worry less about finishing them.
I need to re-evaluate the construction process. I have it pretty much down to a science now, I can order all the parts from McMaster-Carr. But there are two steps that I need to improve, its really annoying to cut the u-bolts shorter with a dremel and I know there has to be a better way to make the knocker hinge then bending a screw eye. Also I haven’t perfected the attaching it to the door part… which would seem like a major part right?
May
02
2012
I try. But I guess I’ll never understand intelectual property rights. First Zazzle wouldn’t sell my “Rad” poster because I didn’t own the rights to the movie. I get that, OK so I don’t own the rights to the movie, even though I drew everything in that picture from scenes in the movie, I guess I can see that I didn’t provide any new content.
I just finished some new pieces for Artomatic and I thought while I was getting them printed I would put them up on Zazzle so I could have the possibility of selling them. But yet again I apparently don’t own the property rights to pieces of Transformers. Not the whole thing. I was led to believe in art school that If you changed the image 70% then it was a new piece of Art. I would think that drawing a transformer from a picture and then combining it with another picture would be enough. Add the fact that I don’t think that anyone would reasonably think that this is an official hasbro product, it’s called PARODY.
What makes things weirder is that they claim it’s because of a copyright claim from the rights holder, but not for the Lincoln one, that’s either because it uses the Lincoln navigator grill, or because I didn’t put Transformers in the keywords.
April
19
2012
Signed up : check
Worked 2 construction shifts : check
Make art : I knew I was forgetting something.
Installation has to be complete by May 13th… and I’m already way behind. But I have lots of old door knocker parts, I’ve finished 2 posters, and I’m almost to the casting stage of 3 new knocker designs. So things are in motion.
April
05
2012
Hey Internet,
Just so you know… if you plug in a $9 trendnet wifi dongle to the Patriot BoxOffice it will wirelessly stream video’s with minimal configuration. I think this is awesome because this is not how cheap electronics worked in the past. It’s pretty great that things just work.
March
26
2012
March
17
2012
This is not ‘The Schumaker Way’ that involves fixing something in a way that doesn’t involve buying expensive parts or paying for expensive labor. It also usually involves fabricating a part out of some leftover bit from another project. Like when my dad bought a new control board for my mom’s SUV window switch, but it didn’t work so he just built a little box with his own switch to roll down the window.
That box was taped to the door for over 2 years before my mom finally got him to get it fixed the right way.
I wish this was that ingenious… This is more of a ‘I’m tired from fixing the more important part of the car the ‘right’ way and I just want to make this a little better then go inside‘ kind of fixing.
The problem was that Laurel’s exhaust had broken completely away from the catalytic converter. After the first few weeks of embarrassment at driving a little sub that sounded like a 16 year old had hollowed out the exhaust on purpose we kind of got used to it. But since her car has to be inspected in a month I thought is try to fix it.
Here’s what I came up with, a couple of U-brackets linked together in some haphazard way. I don’t think it will pass inspection, but at least it won’t be embarrassing to drive for the next month while I think about how to fix it for real.
