Spring Thoughts Sculpture

I am in the process of creating a 38" x 42" floral sculpture commission for a hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am working with Roundtree Visuals on this project. The piece will be completed and delivered by December 1st, 2011 for framing and installation.

Step 2: The original sketch is printed at 100% scale and taped to cardboard. Wire is twisted with an electrician's  wire twisting tool and then it is formed to follow the sketch lines on the paper. Holes are punched through the cardboard  and the wire is tied down in place on the template.

Step 3: The beginnings of the leaves, stems and vine elements.

Step 4: Most of twisted wire form is completed. I am beginning to paper the form.

Step 5: Here is the sculpture, Spring Thoughts, as the wire form is beginnings to be covered with a base papering. I am using Chinese preserved fruit wrappers and will be adding fragments of other papers and food wrappers before I glaze with a two part epoxy glaze from Tap Plastics.It is difficult to see the scale here, but this piece is 38" x 42" large and 1.25" in depth.

Spring Thoughts Sculpture; more process images

Central flower papered with origami paper and food wrappers as of 11/19/11

Leaves papered as of 11/19/11.

Earlier process photo.

Here are some updated process images of the Spring Thoughts sculpture. In these images, the buds and the stems and vine elements are mostly completed. I used Asian food wrappers (Chinese preserved fruit wrappers, Japanese paper chopstick wrappers, origami paper and Chinese olive wrappers.) The leaves and the main central flower are the next elements that will be worked on tonight. I am very happy to be creating art for hospitals again and creating art for neonatal and pediatric installations is particularly rewarding. This piece will be 38" x 42" x 1.25". Previous blog on this piece is at this posting. I will be experimenting with UV resistant surfboard resin as the final glaze.

Thoughts of Spring

Last Wednesday I visited the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek to see the installation of my mixed media sculpture, Thoughts of Spring. I enjoyed working with Roundtree Visuals to create this installation. Below are some images of the work installed in the 3rd floor lobby entrance to the pediatric wing. The installation is 38" x42" x 1.5". I used mostly chopstick sleeve wrappers, origami paper, and Chinese preserved fruit wrappers. A few Chinese tea wrappers and Japanese seaweed snack wrappers are included as well. Some fragments carry special meaning to me as they were from engagements with friends and family. This hospital is really beautifully designed and I was lucky to have a bit of a tour of the new wing. The interior bamboo garden was really lovely. As I was photographing the sculpture, a new mom and baby were rolled by with extended family in a celebratory mood. It was such a great feeling to know that this piece is in such a special setting.

Digital Banner Textiles with Children

As I have mentioned before, I am crafting a workshop series that will introduce children to textile design and which will hopefully result in street banners in the spring of 2011. I am in the last month of a Kickstarter drive to raise funds for this project.
Students at a San Jose, California school and at a Hawaii school have participated in the lead in introductory components of the project.
I have set up a website for the You Are Here workshop series.
Here are samples of the student work:
Hawaii 4th grade student radial pattern explorations

and here:
San Jose 5th grade student radial pattern explorations

Future Engineers Youth 3D Design Challenge

The Future Engineer Design Challenge created by NASA and ASME was a great journey for many K-12 students this past fall/winter. A new challenge will be launching this spring.

All the designs submitted can be seen in the site's gallery page. The site is very well organized to inspire youth and to engage them in a design thinking journey as they imagine a useful zero gravity space tool to be 3D printed in space.

Samples of 5th grade student concept designs in low resolution prototypes and iterated as CAD models.

Many schools participate in this design journey. I have created a collaborative doc to capture the various work flows classes used to engage in the project. I am hoping more teachers add their experiences to the doc.

  When I have engaged students and teachers in exploring this project, I have created cardboard volume forms for them to hold so that they know the maximum print size of the tool they will be designing. While the low resolution prototypes do not have to be 5cm x 10cm x 5cm, designers need to imagine that their final tool will be 3D printed at that size. Here are the design guidelines for this challenge.

Volume forms representing the 3D print size constraint of 5cm x 10cm x 5cm

Youth Film Festival Logo Design

For the past two years I have enjoyed designing logos for Next Vista for Learning's youth video contests.

The upcoming spring contest is called the Creative Flight Video Contest. Students and teachers everywhere are invited to submit their creations (under 90 seconds in length). It has been inspiring and fun to view a diverse range of interesting submissions.








Below: initial rough sketch logo studies

Project wins KCI Rambus Award in Innovation

I was excited to learn last Friday that the Picking Strawberries on Gold Mountain workshop series won First Place in the KCI Rambus 2010 Innovation Award. I conducted this workshop series in four classes at two schools last spring. It is a wonderful honor to have the project celebrated in this way.

Rob Bell's Studio...Animation Stages

I visited Rob Bell's Zomadic Studio again last week. It is always so inspiring to see what he is working on. When I arrived his computer die cutter was working on cutting out segments for an architectural game.


















I felt like I was watching a dance performance as I observed the mechanical arm moved about cutting the wooden lace-like discs.


















I was visiting Rob to commission him to create a portable animation stage for the stop motion claymation classes I will be teaching at Cureton Elementary in Alum Rock, San Jose and in Cupertino in the spring and possibly in the Tenderloin of S.F. at some point. I recently completed teaching animation classes (using iMovies) at Montalvo Arts Center and am preparing to teach similar animation classes across the South Bay. The stage I have made are quite worn (made of cardboard) and it would be great to have a sturdy foldable one that I can transport easily. Here are a few sketch ideas Rob created on the fly while we were brainstorming in his studio:



























After we discussed my project I got to look around his studio a bit. I really enjoyed the detail on this piece below. He told me I could provide an Illustrator file and he could translate that into something his machine could reference to create such intricate etch cutting. I've been dreaming about such detailing on my stage ever since!









































Below is an image of a few of his building toy "blocks". We discussed getting together to think of ways to create elementary/junior high projects that would integrate these components into core curriculum projects. More on this later.



















I also met an artist, Chris Palmer at Rob's studio. He gave me the coolest fold up business card, which should not have surprised me as he is an origami artist. I loved the title on his card "Designer Geometer Ornamentalist Folder" His website is www.shadowfolds.com. His work takes my breath away. It really relates to the textile exploration I will be doing as he folds in fabric as well as paper. I'll be exploring his Flickr site more soon!

Slot Shelters taking form

Well the idea Slot Shelters, that percolated last spring now has a site and five schools engaged. Hurray! I know it will be a long and twisty path to bring the first year to completion, but it is exciting to be taking steps down that road. Slot Shelters is a collaborative project engaging elementary school students in thinking about local and global shelter needs in innovative ways both online and off line through simple slot building cards and though joint designs in Google SketchUp. A better description is on the site: Slot Shelters

















The lessons are still being fleshed out and rubrics being made. I also need to iron out some upload image features, but the Azerbaijan school and Hawaii school are beginning the first "explore" lessons. Many of the lesson draw upon tools I used in the You Are Here Street Banner Project last year, but one tool is new to me. I am excited to learn more about Google Sketch Up and see what the students create in it using their unique photographic textures created in Repper Pro. What is Repper? Check it out and have fun creating patterns: Repper
We will also be using VoiceThread, a great communication tool for discussions around videos or images.

Artist/Arts Educator Pantea Karimi will be teaching lessons with me here locally and we applied for an NEA Media Arts Grant through the Zero1 Art & Technology Network to support the project as it grows, but we won't find out results of application until May 2012.

Thinking Outside The Box wins Best Fine Art Movie in California Student Media Festival!

I was very excited to learn today that Thinking Outside the Box is a winner in the 44th Annual California Student Media Festival. It won the Elementary School Fine Arts category. There is only one winner in each category for the entire state of California. It is now eligible for the Grand Prize which is $1,000. 00; money which would be well used at Cureton Elementary in Alum Rock, San Jose.
















You can see the movie here at SchoolTube. I am very proud of all the Fourth and Fifth Grade students at Cureton Elementary School who created this animation with me last spring and am very grateful to Ms. Arlene U. Illa for opening up her 4/5 combo classroom to so many sessions of my workshop animation project. It takes a great leap of faith for a teacher to gift his/her teaching time to an arts instructor and I take that gift of time seriously and try to put my best effort into creating useful curriculum in the time I have with the students.

More on the concept behind this animation on this posting and this one.

Videos for Slot Shelters

As the Slot Shelter Site gets fleshed out for this academic year, I am slowly adding videos to the site. These videos will either be screencasts of how to use digital tools for the project or will be interviews with designers.

Early last spring I began to contact designers who work and brainstorm in three dimensional prototypes to see if perhaps they would engage in assemblies. As the project moved forward, I began to think video interviews would be a more flexible and accessible sharing of info, especially for schools far away. I see a great benefit to students in expanding their toolbox of communication and brainstorming tools through model constructions and physical tests of ideas. This interview below with an experience design engineer highlights the importance of creating small scale rough models before designers build real buildings and sets.

Moble Maker/Tinkering Cart

Main cart components assembled.

A few years ago my dad (a retired toy designer) made this cart for my niece to sell cupcakes from. Because of permitting issues, she ended up not using it, but I recently saw parts of it in storage at my sister's garage.  This is the perfect solution for the Maker/Tinkering cart I have been envisioning creating.

I'm going to take around this mobile cart and invite kids to creatively tinker. We will stock it with muffin tins of simple making tools: cell batteries, led lights, paper circuity projects, conductive clay, brushbot parts, hacked solar lights (from garden stakes), electrical wire, switches, and hacked toy parts, etc. I have been stewing on creating a mobile cart to take around Japantown, Mayfair and Alum Rock for two years now. Recently I saw this blog posting about  a mobile 3D printer cart, so obviously others are thinking of going mobile with Maker tools as well. I hope to get my cart and supplies ready to take out on the streets of San Jose in the spring and summer. This cupcake cart would fit right in with the other carts roaming the neighborhoods selling paletas, chicharrones (fried pig skins) and Mexican candies.

Below are some photos of the set up. I need to get a new cart to fit into the assembly as the original one was hacked for another project at my sister's work. I'll post new photos once I get the assembly complete and ready to go again. I am dreaming of getting a 3D hobby printer for it, too! Dreaming big! All the supplies on the mobile cart will be used in our Maryfair Art & Design Thinking Summer Camp at the Mayfair Community Center and at the Joseph George Community Center Lab. I'm partnering with the Alum Rock Educational Foundation to expand the Art & Design Thinking camp.

All components and accessories: basic 3 parts, cup cake display carousel, cup cake storage/

transportation trays, screened bug deterrent display screen domes.

Three components before assembly:  Container Store folding shopping cart, pink umbrella 

with extended umbrella shaft and fabricated cup cake shell with prime/gloss white painted.

Progression of cup cake shell design progress/ top views

1. Left: sizing model with cardboard discs and wood separators

2. Middle: intermediate all-cardboard model with experimental fluting hot-melted in position

3. Right: finished model with 1/4" plywood discs screwed to 15 wood stake separators, with scored

plastic strips hot-melted to both top and bottom discs and wood stakes.

Note that squarish hole in bottom disc slips over shopping cart basket, while the slot in the upper

disc enables the shell to capture the handle. The upper disc rests on the top of the basket, and

the cupcake shell is sufficiently locked to the basket form.

Progression of cup cake shell designs/ bottom views

"bikes" by 3dom on Flickr (cc By-NC 2.00) Image of bikes in Laos.

Looking further down the line, it would be cool to put the set-up on a bike and also have a 3D printer on the Mobile Maker Cart.