NEW EPISODE!

A new episode of "How To Do Everything With Garrick And Marvin" is up on DreamWorks TV.

Garrick And Marvin try and teach you How To Play Guitar, with disastrous results.

In one shot I wanted Marvin to put out Garrick's flaming hands with a fire extinguisher device I used an upside down can of compressed air basically to shoot out the propellant.  Of course it's flammable so I made a quick cut from blasting him with fire to blasting with freezing propellant.
It worked out.  Lighting dolls on fire, always fun.

KING OF THE NERDS!

Not myself, I'm not smart enough to be a nerd.  In School I was more of a social misfit even shunned by the nerds.   I'm talking about the new competitive reality show King Of The Nerds in it's third season airing on TBS.  This season my largest sculpture Revenge-Bot is a features art piece in the Nerdvana Lounge.  It was very cool to be a part of the show, and in the 7th episode there is more of my art you will have to watch and find out.

 Installing the piece was made much easier by the crew building a fantastic purple carpeted platform
with a big double door near by for loading in.

The art department did an amazing job transforming the given space into the lounge you see on the show

See there he is in the background.  This summer I will be hauling Revenge-Bot out for another art show and will keep everyone posted on the Gallery and dates of the show.

The very beginning back in the fall of 2012 at the Pretty In Plastic parking lot.

Trimming down some of the metal brackets 

The foam adhesive was another sticky un-dissolvable expanding glue

that managed to get everywhere.

Getting closer to the finished form.  The dust from the sculpting foam is very harsh and

it gets everywhere, worse then sand or sawdust since it clings by static electricity and is not water soluble.

Complete structure ready for resin coating then prime and paint.

Two coats of auto primer

Rolling and brushing several coats of metal acrylic paint.  The paint is infused with iron so it does have a metal base for real rust.

After the metal paint the sculpt is sprayed multiple times with a copper oxide solution 

this is what creates the authentic rust finish.

Now looking very rusty in the blazing sun.

A couple of finishing touches at the gallery...

And it is done!

BETTER EXPLOSION VIDEO!

Blogger has a video upload function that seems to compress the video too much, I wasn't happy with the quality of my first posting.  I have posted a higher rez version of the behind the scenes explosion video




Hopefully I can find excuses to blow up more things soon.  New episodes of How To Do Everything With Garrick And Marvin are on the way.

BLOWING STUFF UP!

The latest episode of How To Do Everything With Garrick And Marvin is up on Dreamworks TV.  "How To Kiss" this episode I wanted to actually try and blow up the machine that malfunctions.  The Kissing Machine itself is a bizarre invention, mostly designed to punish the user.

Black powder was what I used to make the big flash, It was just in an open pile not enclosed in any way.  I protected the camera with a sheet of plexiglass to deflect and hot embers from the camera lens.   Shooting at a frame rate of 60 FPS then slowing it down to quarter speed in post still wasn't quite slow enough to capture the full essence of the blast.

We had some B-Roll recording for the explosion, definitely the fun part of doing animation.

ASTRO SLOTH SCULPT!

The Astro-Sloth sculpture was great fun, if you like sculpting cloth wrinkles which I do.  Now that I'm putting together this post I realized that I did not do much documentation I wish I had!  Promise I will do a wrinkle sculpting how to in the next month.  The pic above was sculpting the back detail, the problem being how to get to the underneath as well as the back with out ruining the front.  Foam padding is a great thing to lay the sculpt on, I was using a fluffy towel, fluffy-ish anyway.

The head was sculpted separately after I baked the body.  Sometimes it's freeing to do parts individually.  The ring around his neck is a 2" diameter  PVC pipe breaking up the flow of the sculpt by having sharp machined piece to contrast the soft wrinkles and fur texture.

People seem to be liking the Astro-Sloth maybe there is a vinyl toy of this guy in the future.

WORST CHARACTER DESIGN!

This particular character was just too horrible to ignore.  Usually I try not just hate a design outright, I think it's more productive to talk about technique, philosophy of design etc.  However The Skinny Cow character is an assault on the eyes and it was right in front of me.

 

This might be an titillating character for the furry crowd, but I don't believe the average ice cream eating public wants a mutant human woman cow peddling dairy treats.  This fits in with an earlier post My Biggest Character Design Pet Peeve from January.   My last character design problem was Pixar's animated short Lava.   The man volcano is a rocky volcano with a face, created from the foliage and stone.  The female volcano is a tall thin human looking volcano with long hair and feminine features, a really bad design that is hard to find an image on the internet, no surprise. Maybe at some point I'll list my top 5 most hated character designs.

For Charlie