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Design Inspiration for the Inventive Mind..

October 3, 2015 By Zog

Pastels on the Plaza 2015 Arcata

Chicken portrait pastels on the plaza

Pastels on the Plaza might just be the most weather dependent event Arcata has. There’s nothing like sitting in the middle of the town square from dawn till midday at the edge of winter, drawing with colored powder. This year brought the dreaded wind. Everything is going along fine a few hours in and then a gust plows through the plaza and throws all your highlights across neighboring artwork, eliciting a collective groan.

This year, I did a portrait of Esther for Genevieve Schmidt Landscape. She was a sweet old hen. We had her for many years, and she was old when we got her. I stopped sketching at the point I realized that the wind was taking things away from me faster than I could add them. Despite the wind, or maybe because of it,  this was the fastest I’ve completed a pastel. I was 80% done in two hours, and then stuck around a while adding finishing touches.

Each year I try to add some sort of innovation to my process. This year it was a boxing glove on my off hand, so I wouldn’t have sore knuckles from leaning on concrete all morning. It worked great and will be back in my kit next year.

Holly Yashi floral pastel Leah Vaughn

Next to me on one side was Leah Vaughn, doing a large square for Holly Yashi jewelry. This is twice the size of mine, but I think it would feel like four times the work. I’m always impressed when someone finishes one.

20151003_133848

To my other side was Casey Vaughn with his epic square for Pizza Gago. The only way Pizza Gago could be any more awesome is if eagles really did deliver their pizzas.


The Alibi- Pastel 2015

The artist who does the Alibi is consistently excellent. I didn’t get a shot of the finished product because she was still working up near 2:00. She gets bonus points for not compromising her quality through adversity. If you click the picture to zoom in, you will see the toll the weather has taken. I’ve worked under that tree a few times. It’s great on the sunny days. Not so much in the wind or rain.

HAF pastels 2015

Humboldt Area Foundation is another one I’ve featured before. This one was signed Cat Erin and Jill. Whatever their division of labor was, the results came out awesome. Like the previous pastel, this is done with water and brushes. Whenever I’ve tried this, I’ve ended up with mud.

Wallace -pastel 2015

Here I was three squares away from Wallace and didn’t even notice or I would have stopped to say hello.

Craghead 2015 pastel

Never one to stay within the lines, Mike Craghead has been doing this near forever, and has consistently been one of the better squares. He was a couple squares down from me. The east side sets the bar high.

And some honorable mentions. There were several I just couldn’t get a good picture of due to crowds and shadows, so if you made an awesome square and it isn’t here, I’m sure that’s why.

Soul to soul

Garden Gate- pastels 2015

Heart Bead art

Pacific Buildere

Stacey Kett Acupuncture

Emerald City Laundry pastels

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Reviews Tagged With: Animals, Art, Design Inspiration, DIY, Pastels on the Plaza, Review

October 7, 2012 By Zog

Pastels on the Plaza 2012

Pastels on the Plaza Arcata 2012

Pastels on the Plaza 2012. What a beautiful morning in Arcata California. Around here, a sunburn is a mark that you have just returned from distant lands with “summer” and “shadows”. Well. believe it or not Arcatians, I got a pretty good sunburn despite two layers of sunscreen. It was worth it. I’m displaying my results (above) large and proud this year. I drew our cat Tamir in our apple tree for Genevieve Schmidt and her awesome gardening blog and landscaping service. It took nearly six hours and measures 3′ x 3′. I’m going to have it printed on canvas and hang it in the living room.

We were surrounded by farmer’s market booths selling fresh local produce, bands, street performers, and crowds of people coming to enjoy the event. I met several old friends I haven’t seen in a decade, and I was in good company. There’s nothing like sitting yourself down in the midst of famous local artists and designers to up the pressure to perform. They set the bar high.

Sitting to one side of me was Leah Vaughn, representing Holly Yashi Jewelry, who have recently opened their own store at their studio. A great place to shop for jewelry or other gifts. I think this image would make an awesome postcard. This pastel was twice the size of mine, and I have no idea how she managed to get it all done by herself. A side note on this for anyone planning on participating in the event; They kicked us out at 3:00, so if you think your concept may take more than seven hours, either rethink it, or get a helper.

Casey Vaughn, Baroni Plaza Store Pastel

Beside her was her husband Casey Vaughn, representing Plaza. This is his first year doing a three foot square, rather than the double size. I think the extra time per foot really allowed him to show off his skills. One of the top looks of the day in my opinion.

To my other side was Susan Devine, representing Barbara Rips with this picture of a dragon on the Trinidad lighthouse. You don’t have to be a business to support the event. North Coast Children’s Services takes charitable donations and we artists donate our time in the name of donors. Everyone wins. And the kids loved this one. Susan was fond of telling them that if they wanted to see the dragon, they had to get to the lighthouse really early in the morning.

Linda Parkinson-Pastels on Concrete

This is a great pairing of the Wildlife Care Center with award winning artist Linda Parkinson. These two really are perfectly suited.

Duane Flatmo 2012 Pastel Arcata

Duane Flatmo, larger than life as always, for a guy who is used to paintings that take up whole buildings, this must seem easy. I spoke with him briefly. It seems he is still touring with his giant fire breathing octopus contraption. Go check it out.

Humboldt Area Foundation

This one was the most vibrant and eye catching hing I saw all day, and beautifully done by these two artists. My only criticism is in the decision making process. If you are going to have one pumpkin spilling out of the square, don’t chop off the one next to it at the edge, and if you are going to sign it, either work it in and make it look nice, or keep it outside the bounds of the picture. There is just no way to crop this to make it look right.

Jerry Lee Wallace - Outstanding in his field

I took a break to stretch my legs and go see what Jerry Lee Wallace was up to. I’ve been a fan of his work since before I started doing the event myself. He has the most distinctive style, with his obelisk-like people and vibrant landscapes. This is a portrait of a guy who is “outstanding in his field”. I love the reflections and the shadow going up the tall grass. The donor was Humboldt Family Services.

B&B

And lastly, a couple of honorable mentions. B&B always cracks me up with their poop-to-rainbows attitude. And I like this one by Ca Redwood Co. I don’t get it, but I like it.

Each year, I improvise a few new techniques, with varying success. This year I brought a chunk of neoprene, with the hope that I could use it as a dry paintbrush. It was remarkably effective, and held up unexpectedly well. It allowed me to blend the pastel I had already applied, so I ended up using less, and having less dust. In total I used less than eight pieces of pastel.

Please feel free to post your thoughts or experiences with the event, and I hope to see you all there next year, same place, same time.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Reviews Tagged With: Animals, Art, Design Inspiration, DIY, Pastels on the Plaza, Review

October 31, 2011 By Zog

Carved Zucchini

zucchini carving halloween vegetable carving

 

I carved a zucchini for Halloween this year (click image to see full size). Going unconventional with my Jack o’ Lantern is typical for me, though I would usually carve a watermelon, but I couldn’t come up with anything that would top last years watermelon skull with brain, so I figured it was time on to move on to greener fruits…errr vegetables? Whatever they are. The zucchini alligator carving took a bit over an hour (it is all one piece, so carving away the area around the teeth took time). It’s almost two feet long.

I recommend the zucchini as a carving substrate. They don’t stink, they aren’t sticky or messy, and they have a ton of firm flesh and only a small center of seeds. They won’t handle a candle though, so use a LED or ultrasonic fog maker.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Art, Design Inspiration, DIY, LED, Watermelon Carving

April 3, 2011 By Zog

SmartBird – Festo Robotic Flapping Bird

SmartBird - Festo

Not a year goes by lately without Festo coming out with some awesome new biomimetic toys, well, industrial automation really, but you can bet these will be in toy stores in some form within a year or two.

This time, they’ve created a bionic seagull, fully autonomous from takeoff to landing. It uses the same kind of active torsion to take advantage of vortices that flying animals use to get that extra edge in flight that has previously been hard to duplicate in man made devices. Turning is accomplished wit a tilt of the tail.

Rather than using lighter than air materials like in their past projects,the SmartBird frame is constructed from carbon fiber, polyeurathane foam and other lightweight but strong materials, yet they’ve still managed to keep it aloft even with the weight of the brains, batteries, motors, and even a radio transmitter. Video below.

For more technical specs, check out their pdf

Related Posts:

Festo Robotic Penguins

Festo Air Jelly

Lighter than air posts

Robotics posts

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Electronics, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Biomimicry, Design Inspiration, Innovation, Robotics, Video

December 12, 2010 By Zog

Rooster SteadyCam

Chicken mounted camera

If you want to avoid shakycam footage, there are a ton of ways to stabilize your camera, ranging from DIY projects, to a huge variety of devices (see here) ranging from simple and affordable, all the way to professional units where if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford them. All these options weren’t enough for this guy though, he’s taken the DIY approach to a new level, giving his rooster a helmet cam. If you’ve ever picked up a chicken, you know that when you move their body, their head stays in the same place (vestibular ocular reflex).

Why buy a fancy steadycam, when you can just carry a chicken? Video below.

It seems to me he has the camera pointed the wrong way. Chickens don’t look straight ahead, they look to the side. The real challenge here is to keep the chicken interested in looking at what you are filming, which could be a good way to make movies for people with short attention spans.

(via Hackaday)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas Tagged With: Animals, Biomimicry, Design Inspiration, DIY, Funny, Idea, Interface, Video

November 23, 2009 By Zog

Pro-Ketch MouseTrap Review

Pro-Ketch Mouse Trap | Kness

Several years ago I had a mouse in my apartment. Being sadly catless, I found myself being awoken every night by skitterings and chewings. Every night, mulling over different mouse trap concepts in my head.

You see, the mousetrap is a sort of DIY right of passage into inventorhood. It pits the wits of man against those of mouse. Mano a mouseo.

After awaking one night to find the little bastard dragging one of my candles away, I started building. What I ended up with was a contraption built of cardboard boxes, fishing wights, levers and brass tubing. It was hardly Alcatraz, but it was effective enough as long as I got to it quickly after it was sprung.

Catching the little guy came with quite a feeling of accomplishment (and relief). I can’t stand poisons. My neighbors once put out some poison only to have the rat die in my wall. It stunk for months. Poisons come with a horrible death and I worry about the risk of the mouse staggering off only to be eaten by a pet.

The other day we started hearing a scrabbling and squeaking coming from the attic. It’s all full of insulation, so tossing the cats up there wasn’t going to be effective. My previous cobbled together solution wasn’t going to hold up long enough to do the job, and I really didn’t know what manner of animal I was dealing with, so I went shopping.

I started under the assumption that I had a roof rat. Unfortunately, the only rat traps I could find were either big electrocuting steel jawed death machines, glue traps, or really poorly made havahart-style traps, but there was a really great mouse trap at Harbor Freight.

The Pro-Ketch (pictured above) is a bit bigger than an old timey video cassette and has two cleverly designed entrances. It’s designed to be put along a wall to appeal to the natural tendency for rodents to run along the edges. It supposedly doesn’t need bait, and is made of steel with a clear plastic window in the top. The entrances have a steel ramp that see-saws on a central hinge. Laying over the bottom of this ramp sits another smaller one, hinged at the base. When the rodent is climbing the ramp, it is standing on the secondary ramp, but when it steps off, it is already past the central pivot of the first ramp and things start to tip, lifting the second ramp to block the exit. Going the rest of the way into the trap causes the smaller ramp to push the main ramp back into the original position, thus priming the trap to catch any addition rodents that are attracted by the first.

I only have tro complaints about the Pro-Ketch trap. First of all, while it comes in a few configurations for location, it really only comes for one size of rodent: small. Second, it doesn’t have a latching mechanism. There isn’t much to stop a mouse from just pushing open the whole lid.

After mostly unsuccessful attempts for a couple nights with various bait, I baited the trap with sunflower butter, putting a thin row of it up each ramp, and a bigger glob in the inside of the trap. I also added a rubber band to ensure it stayed closed. This did the trick almost immediately. Within a couple hours I had caught my mouse and could hear her trying to chew her way out of the metal box. It turns out she was just a cute little house mouse making a lot of racket.

And what became of our unwanted guest? We went for a little walk a few blocks away, where she will now likely be frequenting the home of a particularly irritating neighbor.

There is another nearly identical version of this trap (available with very quick shipping via amazon), the Tin Cat by Victor. Or you could build your own.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Innovation, Reviews Tagged With: Animals, Design Inspiration, DIY, Innovation, Review

October 28, 2009 By Zog

Advertising With Houseflies

Advertising with flies has to be simultaneously one of the ingenious and disturbing marketing tactics in history. Watch the above video of the Frankfurt book fair to see unsuspecting people’s minds blown as a house fly buzzes by trailing a tiny red advertising banner like one of those planes at the beach. I don’t know how effective it would be once the novelty wore off, but in this instance, there were bookworms aplenty stalking flies with their fancy digital cameras, hoping to get a picture. If you have the kind of business where any publicity is good publicity (check your spam box), then this may be your next gimmick.

Before you run off to rile up PETA, the flies were supposedly not harmed, and were only attached by a small amount of wax which fell off in time. You might think I’m kidding about PETA, but they already went after Barack Obama earlier this year for swatting a fly that landed on his arm. I’m not a fan of cruelty to insects, but a swatted fly is hardly cause for a national incident.

I wonder if this adverfliesing was inspired by the recent Bill Gates talk where he released a swarm of mosquitoes on the crowd at the beginning of his speech about the death toll of malaria.

(via Geekologie)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Imperfection, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Corrupted, Design Inspiration, Funny, Idea, Innovation, Video

September 15, 2009 By Zog

Jedi Animals

A-Mighty-Duel

The empire of cute animal sites continues to grow. Sometimes the domain name says it all. AnimalsWithLightSabers.com is a site that needed only be thought up to be a success.

The content is user driven, so if you have some animal pictures or a desire to brush up on your Photoshop skills with a fun little project, check it out and make a submission. I did.

Update: Apparently the site is no more.

Related Posts:

Upside Down Dogs

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas Tagged With: Animals, Design Inspiration, DIY, Funny, Idea, Kernal, URL

August 25, 2009 By Zog

Inspiration Fail

Some ideas come in a sudden flash, as all of the pieces come together in your mind. This is great unless it happens at three in the morning waking up from a drunken stupor, as illustrated below:

Winkers Jeans. For those who would really like their butt to be the first thing people notice about them, and the last. This almost seemed like it had potential, but no, it’s just weird, and not in that good way.

glow in the dark-toilet paperl

Glowing toilet paper. Funny, but why not make something that isn’t a consumable glow, like the holder? It just seems like a good way to end up with people asking you why your butt is glowing.  (at amazon)

dog walking device

A scooter attached to your dog. There are so many accidents waiting to happen here I shudder to think of them all. (via Gizmodo)

sippin-seat_hide-a-drink

Ahh, the never ending battle between people trying to price gouge captive consumers on their beer, and crafty(ish) guzzlers trying to find sneaky ways of smuggling in cheap beer. There have been some interesting attempts over the years, this is not one of them. You fill the seat with beer and then you can sit on it while you drink it, resulting in a cold butt and warm beer, followed by a warm butt on a hard seat. What happens when some lard ass sits on one of these and explodes beer all over the nearby populace? (on Amazon)

iphone-live-view

This is a live-feed App for the IPhone called E-Mail and Walk. It turns your backgrond into a live view from the camera. This will be great to keep people from falling down manholes while texting. I think it will more often be used while driving. (Via I-Tunes)

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Ideas, Imperfection, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Corrupted, Design Inspiration, Funny, Idea, Imperfection, Innovation, Software, Video

June 13, 2009 By Zog

Biomutualisms

I’m not sure the term is going to catch on, being a bit too attached to the biological, but Robert Full uses the term biomutualism to describe the way multiple disciplines working on related projects can create design inspiration greater than the sum of its parts. He explains it in the above Ted Talk by way of an example in his own studies on gecko adhesives, and how his cooperation with other disciplines is resulting in breakthroughs in materials sciences, biology, and robotics.

There is some great footage here of new discoveries relating to tails and how animals use them for everything from self-righting to guided flight. A must watch for anyone designing robots.

Filed Under: Design Inspiration, Electronics, Ideas, Innovation Tagged With: Animals, Biomimicry, Design Inspiration, Idea, Innovation, Robotics, Video

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