I got the posters printed on winkflash.com. I’ve used them for a bunch of other printing projects and I’m happy with them like always. If you get on their mailing list they have great coupons for products.

I’m going to finally get around to putting some skull door knockers on there too. Hopefully I can kick the procrastination in 2012

-Mark

Mark5four0′s Etsy Shop

I got inspired tonight or maybe I just got bored and decided that if I was going to sit around and watch old episodes of ‘Always Sunny’ I should be doing something productive… So I made this.

http://www.boxoffice.swalrus.org/

I am not a woodworker. Any close examination of this construction will reveal this. But I am learning and this is my greatest creation to date. I learned a lot about the materials involved and I’ll try to share those with you.

Birch Plywood

Most of the construction is 2×4 pine but it is ‘wrapped’ in a layer of 3/4 inch birch plywood. I think this is how professionals make cabinets… but I’m just guessing here. This is normally $44ish per sheet, I was lucky enough to find a ‘Special Buy’ at Home Depot and got it for $24 per sheet. I think if you’re cautious with the cuts you could use only 3 sheets with this design. I actually really like the grain pattern that I was able to get in the top of the bar and for the price you can’t beat it. Which brings me to my next point

Staining Birch Plywood

This is where I spent the most time on this bar, not actually cutting wood or painting anything. But stressing over what color and how to stain the plywood. I had been told that it was nealy impossible to stain plywood without blotching problems. So on the recommendation of a couple woodworking forums I bought some pretreater. It was a little bit of an expensive experiment at $26 for a 20oz bottle. But it works miracles. Here’s a picture of the wood with and without pretreatment, same number of coats of stain.
Birch plywood is hard to stain. I knew this going in, but I got a great deal on the wood and I couldn’t afford any better counter top anyway.

Pine Trim Wood

I guess this is something that you just have to learn when you start building things with wood, but pine pretty much sucks for staining. The pretreater that worked miracles on the plywood was no match for the smooth sanded finish of the pine. The only way to make pine stainable would be to sand every visible edge with a rough grit sandpaper to ‘open it up’. They call it ‘select’ and you pay a little more, but I think what they do the make it straight is just run it through the sander an extra time. But besides the staining
it all seemed pretty standard to work with.

Epoxy Bar Top

This stuff is awesome and terrible at the same time. The secret is in the planning and design. If you’re going to cover something and dam the edges I would say go for it. If you think you’re going to flow it over the edges and have it look perfect like the tables at your local Thai restaurant I would prepare to be disappointed. Well, that may be a bit rough. What you’re going to have to to is be prepared for a huge mess. I almost did it right, I laid down plenty of plastic and leveled the bar perfectly. But on the first coat on the top I didn’t mix up enough to fully cover the surface so I was forced to squeegee it over the edge and it got this rippled effect in the process. I poured a second coat and was able to build up the top layer so that you didn’t notice, but the front edge stayed rippled. Another problem was that one edge of the bar didn’t have a lip for the epoxy to drip off of and I was so worried about the front edge that I forgot to smooth out all the drips. I could probably sand them off and try to put poly over them to keep the shine. But sometimes you have to cut your losses and go with what you’ve got.

Basements

They leak! Maybe I should have made sure that the basement was watertight in that corner, because the first big rain the whole area under the bar got wet. It turns out it was a downspout pipe that had come loose so the water was being directed against the foundation. I fixed that and everything seems fine now.

Lessons Learned

• No matter what they say on the label, wood glues and wood putty are not stainable.
• The pretreater required that you pretreat-sand-pretreat. Do Not Skip the sanding.
• With a complex design like the front, I should have stained the wood first before I glued it on.
• Leave room for the drill when mounting the Tap close to the bartop.
• Predrill holes for wires and lights.
• Foot rests are expensive.
• To get the trim to stain I had to let the stain basically dry, then use a rag to wipe some of it off so that you could see the grain. This probably wouldn’t work with lighter stain.

Composition with grey and light brown - 1918 *This is rotated 90 degrees

Marc Dewey of A Rad Documentary was in Calgary this weekend for the 25th anniversary and was able to get me a picture of the poster at the gallery. People were gathered around it looking at all the detail and even placing some bids on it, this thing might get sold after all. I am looking into having prints of it for sale on Cafepress or Zazzle, I’ll keep you updated.

One thing that irks me about the print though is that “Bob not blob” appears twice in the bottom right corner, I had redrawn him smaller and forgot to delete the layer. When they got the .eps file it must have been checked to visible. Which is a little annoying since it covers up the “he’s such a nice boy” lady and the Canadian flag that I hid down there. Which is sad, because THAT LADY WAS THERE!

BMX GALLERY
RAD 25

So I finally finished this! Well finished in the way that I ever really finish anything. I submitted it to the Rad25.com event poster design contest, so I shouldn’t make any more changes on it.  I’m pretty excited about finishing it, I’ve learned a lot as I went along. I could have avoided a lot of the mistakes that I made in the begining. It may not be the perfect poster for the event… it might not win, but I’m not going to be that disappointed if it doesn’t. I am the guy that made my own hooded sweatshirt in my spare time.

Now on to the next poster… I’m thinking Airborne.

I’m trying really hard to stay motivated on this project. I love the movie, but I’m running low on free time and all the new house stuff is taking up a lot of my time. I’ve pretty much got all the major moments of the film in some degree of completion in the poster. I’m struggling with a few layout issues, it’s harder than I thought to include all the major and some of the minor characters in a poster and still make the image flow and look coherent. I have a lot of respect for all poster artists now. It’s been about 2 months since the last update, so I have a couple more characters than usual, as always these aren’t the final versions. I’m still getting all the skintones and color palate correct. This is clearly going to be the biggest Illustrator project that I’ve ever attempted.

Like always it’s a challenge for me to keep scale in mind when it comes to detail for the project. Example, even if I print this out at 44×61 those two girls are probably going to be about 3 inches tall… they have way too much detail, but I got carried away.

Please forgive the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to scale.

Rod (and Rex) racing

Guy with the Rad Tshirt

Grand Prize for Helltrack

Duke Best

Cru and Christian

Bob, not Blob

Bart at the Trials

Oh my heart a Backflip

Bart Girlfriend #2

Bart's Girlfriend #1

If you’re going to build a photo booth, why not do it with some style?

I’m finally getting around to posting about some of the projects that we did for the wedding. Because, if I don’t do it now… it’s never going to happen.

Laurel and I knew that we wanted to have a photobooth at our wedding. We have some great pictures from early in our relationship that were taken at photobooths in Bethany, MD and  Manassas, VA. But when we picked the wedding location in Natural Bridge Va we realized that getting a photobooth all the way down ther was going to be pretty expensive. Over $1500 type of expensive. So I looked into building one of my own. I found a lot of great resources out there.  PhotoBoof being one. But they are charging $600 for their software, which is pretty awesome, but a little overkill for my needs.  If you want to use the photobooth professionally this may be the best option, but I can’t even sell door knockers and hoodies on Etsy, so I’m not getting into the photo booth business.

Read More inside and more pictures!

I ended up going with PSremote because they have a customizable interface that allowed me to have the wedding logo placed on the top of the pictures.  The major problem with it is that it only uses Canon cameras. I wish they would realize that they have a goldmine on their hands and get the ball rolling on other camera drivers. But theres probably some politics involved. So if you’re going to go this route then you’d better have a Canon or a friend that you can borrow one from.  I had the latter. I used an extra Canon DSLR for the camera, but at this range with the lighting set I think any point and shoot would work fine.

Originally I had planned to do a traditional photo booth (enclosed with a curtain and a bench). But then I thought of two things. There will be big groups of people trying to cram themselves into this thing and “How am I going to get this down there?” So I decided to make it collapsible and into something that I could probably use for another purpose in the future. So this thing can also be used, with a little modification, as a Japanese paper screen room divider.

Almost any inkjet printer will do for this, I used one that I got from freecycle. I think it was a canon also, but anything that can print on 4×6 photo paper will do the job. We printed out about 100 strips and I think we only used one ink cartridge, ink isn’t cheap, so this is a good thing.

We like the old school strip style photo booths better than the new digital ones. But most printers wont print on anything less than 4″ strips.  So our solution was to take 4×6 photo paper and perforate a line down the middle so that the guests could take one with them and leave one for us.  The cutterpede system with perforator wheel is about $30 and you can probably get it at your local craft store.  This worked most of the time. But sometimes the paper would get misaligned and the preforations would cut off a bit of the picture. But they can always take another one!  Another idea would be to just have some scissors laying around for them to use.  But the photo booth was storing the pictures in full color on the computer anyway so we had backups.

For the computer you can pretty much use anything with a decent size hard drive. I don’t see this program using much processing power.  I used the laptop that I’m writing this on right now. A Dell E1505  which has the unique ability to fold completely flat. So I was able to hang it vertically. If you don’t have one of these a flat screen monitor will work just as well. I ended up with about 4 gigs of pictures by the end of the night. So make sure you have plenty of free space.

Like all of the wedding projects this was running down to the wire and not totally finished in the end, but It did work and nobody noticed all the things wrong with it. (lights sitting on the top and not mounted inside, wires sticking out, etc)

Tips on photo booth building,  I may not have followed all these instructions… learn from my mistakes!

• PROPS! Even if it’s just a couple of hats, put a box of fun things near the booth. It will make for a much more fun atmosphere!
• They say putting a curtain around the booth will make your guests more uninhibited, if that’s something you would like…
• Put instructions on it, even though its just one button and it works automatically… Instructions will help.
• If it’s your party, have someone to run it for you. My dad really helped out with this. But it would be good to give a little “how this thing works” session to some close friends.
• If you don’t have someone to stock the paper, make sure the pictures are being stored on the photobooth. at least you can post them all on facebook later!
• If it’s an open air “reverse photo booth” like mine, point it towards the wall or put a piece of tape on the floor to tell them where the focus point it. (I didn’t have an AC adapter for the camera so we turned of auto-focus and flash to save power)

I’m not going to post an entire build log, because if you’re thinking about building your own photo booth you can probably figure it out from the pictures.  I don’t have the time to guide you through every tiny step.

It turns out that adding buying a new house and being a newlywed is tough to squeeze into an already tight schedule. One of the things that has been getting pushed aside is updating this blog, facebook, and most other computer related projects. This past weekend was presidents day so I was able to catch up on some projects and kind of keep my head above water on some others.

Overall the house is getting to feel more like a home, we have the living room/kitchen area pretty well set up as well and the bedroom completely set up.  Since those two rooms are pretty much the size of our entire previous house it’s pretty easy to forget the rest of the house even exists. The Office is in some kind of usable state, Kara (Laurel’s sister) is using one of the bedrooms and the other is filled with everything that doesn’t fit in the other rooms of the house.

It’s becoming a slower process to finish setting up all the other rooms. I’m hoping to have some time to get to some art projects in the coming weeks (door knockers, Rad Hoodies)

As if I needed another project… Enter, The Basement Bar.

We started building the bar in the basement, I’m hoping to have a full descriptive post sometime or at least some better pictures. It’s looking very smooth and thanks to Wade, Charlie, and Jesse much better than I would have built it myself.

I’ve also included a picture of the cabinets and workbench in the ‘laundry /Art project room’ Hopefully I’ll get to sit down there and finish some projects soon!