The Map of Your Life.

They say that smell triggers the memory the best of any stimulation. I can think of a few memorable smells, but nothing reminds me more of very specific memories than sorting receipts. I remember the period in time, the group of friends I was hanging around at the time, so many different memories and emotions are brought up when sorting receipts. Like the time a friend and I went to the mall (a big thing to do when you live two hours away from the closest one) and were so crazy about Metal Gear Solid 2 that we each picked up a Solid Snake action figure from Software Etc... That's right Software Etc. not Gamestop. There was also the time that another friend and I went to Norde's Games and each bought a box of Magic the Gathering cards and took them back to his place and just tore through them, reading cards, rummaging through each other's spoils, being a bit disappointed by the condition of the brand new cards because a third of them were misaligned to the point to where you could nearly see the name of the next card on some of them.

With every bag of miscellaneous old receipts come the check stubs as well. I was able to piece together a comprehensive history of my grossly underpaid days at Pizza Hut. I was able to easily map my employment history through looking at my check stubs, even though I still don't know what happened to the ones from my days at Blockbuster. I even found my very first pay check, which totaled eight dollars and seventy cents. $8.70! For a person just starting out in the work force, that's a huge blow to the morale, having worked a week before receiving the paycheck, I remember muttering to the person next to me that I should just quit if the pay is gonna be like that. Then there are the random bits of memories that make their way into the bag as well. Such as a part of a label from an art piece that was submitted to the club I used to be a part of, a scribble on this receipt, a calculation on another, a warning of violation a friend I worked with wrote against me in jest that threatened to have my hands severed off as punishment.

To sort through receipts is really a sort of map of what a person's life is like. I will usually pick a receipt up off of the ground just to see what a person bought. They're never profound purchases though; gum, a bag of combos, a soft drink... I suppose that, in itself, shows something about the people who throw their receipts on the ground. The discarded receipts show me that they're horrible people for littering the ground and that they only throw down the small stuff. I'll probably never see a receipt for a 46" LCD Television lying on the ground. Maybe they feel that they're doing a service to the curious folks like me by doing it. I could live without it.

Seeing this history in a bag shows me how frivolous I seem to have been with my money. What if I hadn't bought that speaker system for my car that my neighbor helped me install or that collection of Magic the Gathering cards that I played regularly with a group of friends in college? Maybe I would be richer, but I wouldn't have all the memories.

The Rote Goodbye.

I have worked at a few different places in my life. I started out as a short cook for Pizza Hut. One of the things they teach you is to be friendly by sending the customers out of the restaurant with a friendly good bye. A lot of my coworkers would send people off with the same line all of the time "Have a good day" whether it was day or night. This is how you can tell if your server is just going through the motions.

I didn't go with the same rote memory line and tried to pay attention to the time of day and even what season it was. Especially if it was near Christmas, I would wish the the customer a Merry Christmas on their way out, which in itself could spark a debate, but I did it simply as a friendly gesture.

For those of you who work in the service industry or in retail, if you do send people off with the "Have a good day" line every time an easy way around all this is to just say "Have a goodn" which is especially effective the south. But at least try to be more personable, people know when you're faking it.

Merry Christmas!

EWJ Mighty Mugg III

I decided to split the mold down the side as opposed to cutting it into pieces as indicated with the yellow on the left.





Here is a photo of the sculpt after I extracted it from the mold. The latex seemed to soak up some of the oils in the clay slightly drying it out. It would still mold like clay, but I thought this a peculiar effect.



I then taped up the side and painted a layer of latex over the tape and the seam so resin wouldn't leak out.



Tada! Here is the cast I'll be using for my Mighty Mugg Custom.



Here is the first attempt at making a cast of the mold.



Detail.



Detailed detail.




Details.



Deets.

As you can see the result was less than spectacular. After discussing with my assistant what could have caused such catastrophe, we decided that not allowing time for the mold release agent to dry made the bubbles form. Had I properly used the agent, I probably wouldn't have had such a difficult time getting the cast out of the mold on the second try, but after some struggle I was able to get it out without destroying the mold.



Detail.

This was a great learning experience. This job is best done with help from another person if the mold isn't easy to work with. Since I had such an odd shape, and I did not take the time to make a brace that would allow me to properly pour the resin myself, my assistant held it while I poured and then we placed the mold in a cup stuffed with gift tissue to let it cure.

I was a bit sloppy with pouring the resin and I accidentally got resin all over my assistant's hands while she held the mold upright. She then waited for me to finish pouring (it starts to set in about 3 minutes) and the resin started to set on her hands. She spent the next hour washing her hands with dish detergent, lava soap, and nail polish remover to get the stuff off her hands and then another half an hour filing her nails.

Use rubber gloves! On the next try I used quite a bit less of the resin and my assistant wore gloves which she highly recommends as well. Because the resin cures so quickly it generates a lot of heat, which is another reason to wear gloves. After careful consideration my assistant and I decided it would be best to snip off the other end of EWJs head so that we could pour the resin in both sides, ensuring no bubbles would form in the narrow tip.

Now on to work on the Mighty Mugg's body, sanding the head, spraying with primer, and painting.

Gift Box

I'm nothing like Martha Stewart, and I'm not one to tell someone how to wrap their gifts because I'm horrible at it. However I did discover a trick that allows you to use the boxes from gifts given the past Christmas without any confusion.

When I open a box and find that I got the same gift as last year, my mind immediately rattles off scenarios on what could have gone wrong, and then I open the box to find something completely different and I calm down. You would think that I would learn to expect seeing old boxes, but for some reason I haven't.

"What!? Another lamp!? Oh wait, cool."

Anyway, I feel that opening a gift to find a brightly colored and somewhat familiar looking box with something else inside is slightly unpleasant and can be remedied with the trick I'm about to show.

The trick is to simply turn the old box inside out so that the graphics of the old product are hidden inside the box and the brown inside of the box becomes the outside so that there is no possibility of confusion. As illustrated below:









Probalo solved.

Comparative Picture Fun!

This is simply a light hearted look at the likenesses of people next to their cartoon counterparts. I mean no harm to anyone by posting these comparisons.

A Gelfling from The Dark Crystal.


Nitz from Undergrads.


A Doozer from Fraggle Rock.


Meg from Family Guy.


These just happen, I don't put any effort into searching for these, they just fall into my lap. In fact, I started them around 2001, so it will be a while before I have more. There was this one man in my home town that looked just like the G-Man from the Half-Life series but I was never able to get a photo of him, but maybe one day by happenstance I will get lucky enough to meet him again.

Timelapse and Geocaching Videos.

Bear with the ads on the videos, Revver.com pays me according to the number of views and how much the video spreads to host my video on their site and the money comes from the ads. Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

Timelapse video of the county fair.



A video about geocaching.



Timelapse video of a lobster grow toy.



Ratings are a pretty important factor in getting the most views, the more good ratings the better so go to the links below and rate em would ya? There is a whole slew of ways to share the videos above by clicking on 'menu' in the video window. If you dig it, Digg it. I put the geocaching video on Digg myself.

You have to visit my Revver page to digg the videos.

In addition to the embedded videos above Vimeo is my favorite video site that I have uploaded these videos to. I just think it plays more smoothly and looks better. I also put them on youtube and metacafe.

EWJ Mighty Mugg II

As promised here are some photos of the Earth Worm Jim sculpt I did for the Mighty Mugg Custom.







The clay I used is a wax-based clay which means that it won't dry out. This particular batch was made by a fellow artist, but is very similar to Castilene in that you have to use a heating lamp in order to soften up the material enough to work with it. Once you get to the later stages of the sculpting process the cooled clay makes for a firmer surface that makes it easier to do fine detail work.

Some people use polymer clays, which are desirable because the clay doesn't dry out and can be baked on low heat to harden it solid when the sculpture is finished. However, baking the clay can make for a difficult time, depending on the intricacy of the sculpt, if planning to do molds and casts of the sculpture. When doing casting and molding, the clay is then no longer the finished product and is often destroyed when releasing it from the mold.

I decided to try the Castin' Craft Mold Builder and Mold Release, and Amazing Casting Resin on my first try with molding and casting a sculpture. The process is fairly straight forward. Mold Builder is basically a viscous liquid latex rubber that once painted on a sculpture dries to a yellow rubber coating.



The directions suggest doing ten coats of the Mold Builder and also suggests using Castin' Craft Resin spray on the clay to coat the sculpture before using the Mold Builder. I did not before I started using the Mold Builder but I think it will be alright anyway since I partially peeled the mold off with no trouble.

Here is what the EWJ sculpt looks like with the Mold Builder applied.





So the next question is which method would be best to extract the clay from the mold? Cut down the side? Or cut the mold in half and do two casts that I would have to glue together? Yet another question that I'll have to figure out later is, how do I attach the head to the mighty mugg body and to where it is sturdy and still does not touch the rim of the neck?