Last weekend, I convinced my uncle to help me make a small set of Tetris-style shelves. The plans can be found at Instructables. Between my uncle and me we made the following modifications:

• Used biscuits on all the corners in addition to glue and nails. This makes the corners more stable and is particularly helpful on the unsupported concave corners of the L, S, and T pieces.
• Used 10″ clear (no knots) pine planks instead of the 8″ used by the author. I did this because I wanted to also store books and records that are deeper than the DVD/Game cases the author planned to store.

After sanding, we finished with Watco Danish Oil (Natural flavor). The can lied, though, and it was more than 8 hours until they were ready to use. It was closer to 36 before the surfaces stopped being oily and I was comfortable putting books on them.

I’m tremendously excited to have these finished, and I’m very grateful to my uncle for all his work on the project. Perhaps next year I’ll add a few more pieces to the collection!

The final project from my Digital Photography class at OSU. I stitched togethe a long series of shots I took of a flowerbed in Columbus, OH. I manipulated that image to simulate file corruption, then printed it on a long roll of glossy photo paper. The paper I placed in the output tray of a small, non-functional inkjet printer to imply that this printer was producing the image. In the original gallery exhibition, I stuffed the paper tray of the printer with flowers from the same bed featured in the photo (don’t worry, I paid for them). I replaced these each day of my exhibition to keep them fresh. The idea I was trying to show was that we can take something beautiful and jam it into one of our digital representation devices, but no matter how shiny and colorful the output is, something will be lost in the conversion.

In these photographs, artificial flowers are used, since the mums I used were no longer available after I ran out of my first batch.

For my Undergraduate Honors Thesis, I dissected four laptop computers (all of them very old and very broken) and replaced their backlights with LED’s. I used acrylic paints mixed with a gel gloss medium to paint Windows 98 defragmentation imagery on acetate, and I installed this acetate in the screens of the laptops so the LED/diffuser assembly lit them evenly and gave them the appearance of being the image on the computer screen.

My project addressed the file fragmentation map of a Windows computer as a portrait of the shared lives of computers and their users. I created a (woefully undocumented) life story for each user as I painted, keeping each one to a different life’s usage patterns. Each also expanded the imagery a bit more, adding more colors and in one even changing the shapes.

The intended meaning of this piece is lost to the mists of time, but I still think it’s pretty cool. A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) sits upon the skull of a cat (lower organism) and holds the skull of a chimpanzee (higher organism) depicting its place in the chain of things. This is a reference to the classic “Philosophizing Monkey” which shows a small simian contemplating the skull of a human.

On my second time taking the 3D modeling/animation class at OSU, we struck up a deal with Columbus-based Laser Reproductions to cheaply produce stereolithographic rapid prototypes at a student-affordable rate. These aren’t those fragile plaster things you usually see, either. These are a translucent plastic formed from thousands of liquid layers cured with a UV laser.

Preparing models for prototyping is a bit of a challenge. There are angles that can’t be reproduced, and everything has to be perfectly solid with no normals or vertices misbehaving. Since some folks in the class were doing 3D for the first time, it was my job to clean up other people’s models in addition to preparing my own.

Enuma was my first model produced. The character is based on Marduk from Babylonian mythos. From within this primal god’s shell, a tiny dodecahedron is produced as a reference to the 3D modeling process.

Tralfamadorian Predation shows a pouncing Phidippus Audax, a type of American jumping spider, in many points of its jump simultaneously. This is my take on the class’s instructions to model an animation in a single frame.

4 Viewports represents the modeling experience. In most 3D modeling software, the user sees a standard four viewports, each a different camera pointing at the subject from another angle. The most common angles are Front, Side, Top, and Perspective. This model takes a human figure and places it in those four views in physical space.

I slipped this model in to a production run after finishing my assignments. I based the model off of a sketch I borrowed from a Columbus, OH Artist and good friend of mine. I love the style of her character sketches, and I had to see one in the “real world.”