I was thinking about how the written word sometimes doesn’t quite convey the manner of speaking intended by the writer. Consider this sentence:
That “a bit ‘O home” may sound to the ears of those on the review board as somewhat uneducated hadn’t occurred to me but, what the heck, what’s done is done.
Of course the whole of the English Language is a hot mess ( [dialogue], [wiki] ); but as I see it what the heck is a sort of rhetorical question. Would a special mark help the reader? Probably not, but it was fun to design one anyway:
I’m not sure if the animal in this picture is a fish or what, but it kinda looks like a tiny forest mousey-critter. If so, that thing is an imperial cuteness overlord.
I found the picture on Tropic Ventures (eyeontherainforest.org), when Makezine reported on a blue blue hardwood which apparently exists in Puerto Rico. Awesome.
Post-Publish: I just found out it’s a frog. Oh well.
Only one of these items was an impulse buy, and neither is quite as destructive as Mouse:
He has a drinking problem.
I hope to be melting army men & generally making a mess of things in the near-term. Although, I’ve already told Journeyman Protector he can babysit the heat gun for me. It’s not as I have stacks of ABS lying around anyway.
I’ll be molding clay onto the styrofoam head in the coming days to sculpt a clone trooper helmet. I’ll use that to make a mold. Maybe the guys in the 501st could use some extra helmets.
It’s obviously not a one-night project. I haven’t even gotten all the materials together. I heard that Artstuf is the place for what I’m looking for, it’s just too bad the site search isn’t very refined.
Once & some time ago, while dreaming up other things, an image came to mind of very little folk living in a damp and ancient wood. I wondered about the sort of ways these tiny forest masters might make their homes, and how they would spend their time.
I did a few quick (and now lost) sketches, imagining these little gnomish fellows at a variety of tasks:
Mending a mouse’s broken tail,
Placing a baby finch in a grass-weave basket and carrying him back up to the nest from which it fell,
Collecting wild berries and leaves,
Helping possums to set up traps (presumably to ward off wild cats).
But there was one activity that seems to me both idyllic and daft. I thought, “Perhaps they may like a fireplace to gather around.” Yet, in the stead of perhaps more conventional building materials such as stones, I sketched them using something more unexpected: wood, by way of a felled tree’s stump.
I wanted to explore the concept, so I started with someone’s very nice drawing of a tree stump I found online:
Then, I added lines on top to visualize what it might look like:
I also made a small excercise of the idea in clay:
Click for full-size.
Click for full-size.
Now you’re probably thinking it unwise; or that it may be a short-lived actvitity to place a flame inside of a tree’s stump. I can only think they would not do so if it didn’t work quite well, so spare your naysaying should you happen upon such a chimney.
Here’s a little (literally) project I made a while back. It’s all balsa, colored with markers and detailed with a 0.005mm inking pen.
Click for full-size.
As you can see, before placing the roof & door I placed several pieces of wood inside to make a workspace & various non-descript (but useful-looking) items. It’s hard to catch with a camera all the details that are inside there, but it’s clear someone has been working. It’s very lived-in.
