My first guitar kit build

I was pretty excited this year to get a couple of guitar making kits for crimbo! Been thinking of making a guitar for a while, and one of my favourite styles of all time is the SG. In my mind I imagined a dark brown sunburst finish...

After a couple of coats of stain. The wood strangely didn't take the stain in the beautifully uniform fashion I had hoped it would. Perhaps with a more expensive block it would work better? I couldn't quite build up the layered depth of colour I needed for a sunburst.

Quite nice grain on the headstock - definitely wanted to keep that!

I didn't take any pics whilst figuring out the wiring - and it was all over in a relatively short period of time, much to my surprise. Worked out a lot simpler than I had anticipated.

...what I ended up with was a vague kind of worn sunburst, which I actually quite like, luckily! Took me the better part of two days of sanding, staining, oil coating and waxing to get to this stage. 

I'm intending to potentially swap out a few bits of hardware, cut a custom headstock inlay and do a few other bits and pieces. Will post any further developments!

Avengers Assembled!

Making Iron Man

Been very quiet on the blog front for a while, busy with lots of stuff and didn't want to unveil this one until I knew I'd get it done! Was a real rush in the end and the finish was super shoddy but the overall effect worked alright - although the costume fell apart pretty much constantly throughout the night! Got to say a huge thanks to everyone who kept me in one piece and helped repair with piles of duct tape!

all pieces started as pepakura files nabbed off the rpf forum - printed and hot glued together.

The paper constructions were then covered with resin and strengthened with fibreglass - I didn't take any photos at this stage as I had to work quickly before the resin could gel, and that was annoying enough on it's own!

Ideally, the whole thing would have been covered with auto body filler too, but I barely had time to do this for the helmet alone. Would take forever to make this up to scratch! It's a process of sanding, filling, then sanding again, and filling. Then sanding. And filling.

I made the arc reactor out of pound shop bits and bobs, as well as a few things bought off of ebay and the like.

I soldered on bits of copper wire to make it look a tad more like the movie version. Kind of.

 

And skip ahead to completion! As I said, shoddy as hell but overall ended up looking alright.

dodo skull

got really bored, drew a calavera style dodo skull.

curiosity

Been keeping up with the Mars Science Laboratory mission, really interesting stuff. The range of cameras they have on board is pretty awesome. This is my first illo based on the mission, will hopefully end up with a series. Stuck it up on Society6 where prints are available. Woop.

elements - oxygen

Started looking at building a few illos based around the periodic table and the elements that make up the human body. By far the most abundant element in all of us is oxygen. Pretty cool. This is a bit of a recyled job using some old bits and pieces that I had lying around on my computer, hopefully more experimentation to come.

Paper stencils

monochrome screen print

Because the last post's picture of my initial screen prints of this design was so crap, thought I'd share the latest monochrome t-shirt print.

new screen print

New type work

I've been working on some typefaces to go alongside some articles I'm writing. The first example is a blueprint style version of Gliese to go alongside an article on failed inventions. The second font was a bit of fun that came about from the desire to create a modern gothic style font. It's a bit too 'boxy' at the moment, I might try adding to it/tearing it apart and starting again. I quite like the three dimensional effect going on. Meh.

Gliese typeface - complete!

Napoleon Dynamite illustrations

Over the last few days I've been working on some illustrations for a review I'm writing on Napoleon Dynamite, for the Sauce mag. They are also available to buy on society6. I haven't done much drawing type stuff, feel like I want to do more of it. I might also illustrate a few more characters from the film fairly soon...