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Helena’s Clock

Helena’s wall needed still more decoration so we made her a clock.

She ordered the motor and hands online. We cut abstract clippings that resembled numbers (however vaguely) from a recent High Fructose (HF, along with Juxtapoz, is where I get most of the crazy illustration I use making wallets). She got little frames to put them in, and just cut a random shape out for the middle to cover the ugly clock motor. The clock turned out really awesome (kind of a crappy picture ’cause of artificial light). It was much more her nice work than mine.

Helena’s Sun Mural

Helena’s new room is big, bright, and yellow. To take up some of the wall space, we decided to paint a pretty sun. I designed it in Illustrator and used a cardboard curve for the rays and a string anchored in the corner for the concentric circles all the way out. The colors were pretty splotchy to start so we had to use at least 3 or 4 coats everywhere to get it pretty looking.

The original design

Doing some painting

And… finished

Sky Barons: WW1-Style Flying/Dogfighting for the iPhone

These are some shots of the iPhone game I’m working on. The game is designed to use the iPhone’s accelerometer like a virtual flight stick–you pull back, the plane pitches up; you angle left, the plane rolls left. The premise is a ridiculous false history: instead of entering WW1, President Wilson calls for a massive international tournament of the air to decide the victor. The warring nations agree to abide by the treaty, each builds its own arena, and the best pilots in the world get sent to duke it out.

Since I got my iPhone with the goal of building this game, a few other such apps have come out (XPlane, FAST), but I don’t find any of them very fun. For example, in FAST you just fly an F-22 in the open sky and launch heat seeking missiles in the right general direction. It’s a lovely gane, but it gets kind of old. Sky barons is designed to let you swoop dramatically between obstacles and do ridiculous-nosedives-with-last-second-pullups with ease, all with the goal of putting a few shells through your opponent’s fusilage. It’s got online p2p combat and crazy complex courses like Germany’s “gauntlet” with swinging mines and turret guns, or the US “Southwest Canyon”, a snaking canyon/tunnel complex filled to the brim with dangerous stalagmites.

I’m finishing up the single player stuff and need to finish out a good set of debut levels and then build all the multiplayer capabilities before release.

Alice on my Wall

I finally got around to painting Alice and the Cheshire Cat on my wall:

It was really easy, it just took a few steps. Here’s how:

Photoshop your image down to basic lines

• Get a hip image, open it in Photoshop, and trim out all the junk until you’re down to just the part you want as the basis of your stencil (use the eraser or the select tool). I wound up cutting all the leaves out of mine to keep it clean.

• Crank the contrast way up and adjust the brightness if you need (image > adjust > brightness/contrast)
• Use a gaussian blur to reduce the detail (filter > blur > gaussian blur); you might have to play with how strong you want it; I think I had mine set at 5.6. For this step and the next the image size actually matters though, because they operate in absolute pixels rather than a relative scale.
• Do a cutout to get the stencil look (filters > artistic > cutout); use 2 for the number of levels and play with the other two settings to get the level of detail you want. Because mine was so big, I used the lowest setting for ‘edge simplicity’ and the highest for ‘edge fidelity’.
• If you need to run brightness/contrast again to get back to a simple black-and-white, do so. You might also want to invert the black and white of the image (image > adjust > invert) to make the next step easier, depending on your wall color.

• If you need to do any touch-up (like my cheshire cat’s right eye, for example), you can either do it here or on the wall, depending on your free-hand skills.

Halloween 2009

For halloween this year I was Link from Zelda. But I also worked on a few other costumes. Here’s some of the documentation:

Tunic: Simple green velour with trimming of green patterened silk. Trimming is easier than it looks: just cut your trimming material to strips 3 times as wide as you’d like the trim to be, then iron it in half lengthwise, then fold the cut edges in towards the middle, then iron them down. You’ll have strips that are incredibly easy to machine-sew onto the borders of your main fabric. I put grommets in these at strategic locations, such as up the sides, at the neck, etc., and laced with leather thong.

Hat: The wig was the “surfer dude” wig from the Garment District in Cambridge.  The hat is a simple sewing job whereby you measure, pin conservatively large, sew, then try it on, identify loose areas, and turn it inside out again to sew a little further in on those spots.

Boots: I scrapped the idea of full boots because I had a halloween alleycat race to ride and needed my shoes. Instead, I sewed what were essentially legwarmers out of a faux leather fabric. There’s no great way to fit your legs without some trial and error, same as with the hat: make them generally right but a bit too large, then turn them inside out and sew a little smaller on any loose areas.

Accessories: I bought two cheap, wide, brown leather belts at k-mart, sewed a few rings onto one to help sheath the sword. The sword I got on ebay for about $30 — it was the only one whose dimensions I liked, but it came a ridiculous blue, so I painted it with metallic silver paint and it looks great (it looks like someone’s manufacturing much better looking ones now than they were when I bought it). For the necklace I just went to a bead store. The pouch was a simple inside out sewing job. I nixed the idea of ears because I’m terrible at stage makeup.

Undergarments: American Apparel thermals all the way. You could go cheaper but the army/navy stuff tends to be off-white and just doesn’t look as good.

I also helped with a few other costumes this year. Helena wanted to be a stick figure, so I got her some EL Tape and inverters and we did that. Here are a couple videos a friend shot of her dancing at Love in the west village:

If I had this to re-do, I’d have gone with EL wire instead of tape. I’ve used it plenty before and wanted to try tape because of the brightness, which I thought she’d need out in new york, but in retrospect the extra power consumption and the fact that it only has one glowing face (as opposed to cylindrical wire) makes it just not worth it.

Lastly, Nick wanted to be Scorpion, so I also sewed his costume. We used some shiny synthetic blend for the gold, thick black trimming ribbon on the edges, and some lightly padded black lining fabric underneath to give it some structure (like you’d find on the insides of most jackets). I just used a couple of velcro strips to hold the belt on. Nick did a great job with the other components, somehow managing to dig up the perfect wrist, shin, and mouth pieces. Most impressive.

And of course, Zack wore my old Ghostbusters costume. It gets use every year with one friend or another.

Wallet Making How-To

I make, give as presents, and occasionally sell artsy wallets. When the wallet I’d had for a decade was stolen at a concert a few years ago, I decided to make my own rather than buy another. I figured out a simple technique that everyone loves. It’s quite easy. The wallets look beautiful and last for 8-15 months depending on how well put together they are, and then you make a different one to switch things up. For your reference and mine, here is how:

this is my current wallet; it's been in use about 8 months and still in pretty good shape

Find an image and clip it. Unless I stumble upon something randomly awesome, I typically use magazine clippings, particularly from art mags like high fructose and juxtapoz and regular mags with great design like Wired. You will need to cut your image to 7.5” x 6” or 6.5”. The 7.5” will leave a little bit of a margin on the sides to account for shape when folded. The 6” will be folded in half to create the pocket, so 6” will give you a wallet not much deeper than your cards and bills, while 6.5” will give you a deeper wallet. Find an image you’re sure will be big enough. When necessary I have combined images with breaks at the magazine fold and used completely separate images for the inside and outside (being 3” to 3.25” tall each), but be aware that these will likely create small cosmetic imperfections. When you’ve picked an image, cut it carefully. Always measure twice and leave a margin rather than cutting too small.

coated in contact paper, the image we're working with here is of a mermaid kissing a diver

Use clear contact paper to coat the image. This is important for strength, appearance, and durability. Regular laminate would be too hard, while I’ve found that clear contact paper that comes on rolls has major imperfections that really wind up looking like ugly blotches. I use Avery contact paper which I have bought in large packages but which you can buy in two-sheet packs at a CVS.

Use clear vinyl to make the shell and pocket. I use heavy shower curtain from a regular store like Bed Bath & Beyond; cheap shower curtains won’t work. You can get clear vinyl elsewhere, though, if you look around. I have been meaning to experiment with mylar sheets sold at art supply stores for a long time but haven’t gotten around to it. Depending on what you buy you may want to iron (on a low setting and with some cotton fabric like a t-shirt between the vinyl and the iron) and/or wipe it free of dust first (shower curtains come ridiculously dusty; I don’t understand why).

follow the folded vinyl; the pocket is on the left

The vinyl ought to be in pieces about 10 x 18. Carefully crease your image in half the long way so that its folded dimensions are roughly 7.5” x 3”. Make sure to crease so that the outside of the wallet is facing out, and so that the crease is well pressed and not going anywhere. wrap the vinyl the long way starting at the inside of the main pocket, wrapping around the inside face of the wallet, to the outside face, then around to the inside of the main pocket again. But! To make the pocket for your cards, you need to leave a card-sized flap hanging down 2.25” from the bottom of the wallet, which you will fold up on the inside and which will become the pocket. The ends of the vinyl that will be on the inside of the main wallet pocket ought to go most of the way to the bottom of the pocket, but they don’t need to be at all perfect; just trim any extra off. It IS important that the card pocket be pretty perfect, though; it’s a pain to get cards out of pockets if they’re too tall or uneven, and obviously too short causes problems. Try some cards in it to check. Once you’ve got the vinyl tightly wound around the wallet, fold it in half (like it was in your pocket) and put it under something heavy for a while to shape it up. I actually tend to put them under the hottest corner of my laptop; I think the heat helps ease them into the right shape (weird but it works).

sewing up the middle, and later closing off the thread on the side

Sew the wallet together, starting in the middle. Start by folding the wallet in half like it’ll be when it’s in your pocket. Make sure the vinyl is tight everywhere. First sew on the inside and in the middle, sewing just up to where the pocket is. Then get some cards out of your own wallet, put them in the pocket, and sew the edges up one at a time so that the vinyl is relatively (but not terribly) tight around them. To close it off I like to just loop through the thread on the sides over and over, tying a single knot each time.

Trim excess vinyl and image material. Carefully trim off any excess vinyl as well as any of the inside part of the wallet that can be seen from the outside. Don’t trim too close to the thread!
Voila!

Ghostbusters Costumes

This is my proton pack. Nick and I made three of them. The best guide to do so is here, although I wired mine with a series LED array rather than the recommended incandescents, which has drastically improved my battery life. We agree with most of the default recommendations from the GBFans site, though. We wear standard military issue jumpsuits obtainable online or from most army/navy surplus shops (such as Galaxy here in nyc).

These are great costumes that got us lots of cred for years at top costume contests in nyc and boston. When we walked into the costume contest at Kresge (@MIT) a few years back, the whole auditorium went up in applause — to them we were almost as good as the real thing. People constantly shout things from “who ya gonna call????” to “duh nuh nuh nuh nuh nuh” [ed note: to the tune of the GB theme song] to “what’d you do with the black guy???” Down-right hilarious, I’m telling you.

Anyway, these are not-too-hard and very fun to build and will serve you for the rest of your life whenever you don’t have time to put together something new, or when your friends are lazy and want to borrow your great costumes. As of 3 years ago I’ve formally retired mine in favor of newer costumes, but I thought I’d post it here anyway.

Tetris Quilt

This is a quilt I made a while back for an ex-girlfriend. It’s a tetris board with her name (Amy) spelled out in the pieces (it is not to scale with a regulation tetris board). Some day when I have more time I’ll better document my quilt making activities. I don’t quilt a lot, but on occasion they make really unique and personalized gifts.