Category: creativity

Link’s Bow
by Kimliatach

I now have two build videos of the build process of my ‘Zelda Wind Waker’ ‘Hero’s Bow’ live on my YouTube channel.

Part one here takes the project through from idea to a finished form.

and part two here takes the project through to painted completion and ultimately collapse and catistrophic failure.

I will persevere and rebuild or recreate this project on a sturdier and more flexible frame in short order. For now however I have chosen to pursue some other projects including tool making and tool restoration as well as finishing the arrows and quiver prior to reattempting the bow.

Zelda
by Kimliatach

Zelda Wind Waker grabbed my imagination the very first time I saw it many, many years ago now on a Gamecube in somebody else’s lounge room. Now, by the power of modern computing, I have been sharing the joy and frustration of this adorable game with my sons. Intermittent play has gotten us almost to the end after a few months now.  I also now have two of three Zelda inspired projects complete and ready to share. The first is the newest one, Link’s boomerang (the protagonist is Link, Zelda is the eponymous princess). This was given to F for Christmas and was designed specifically to be light enough for indoor play as outdoors it is very likely to end up in a tree or on the roof.

The second is this papercraft model of the Link’s boat the ‘King of Red Lions’ This took way longer than anticipated and is far from the perfection I envisioned. But it is at least done. I have shared a gallery of images here on imgur and in r/papercraft here.

 

 

A Box of Art
by Kimliatach

An extremely hot and quite busy couple of days here on the surface of the sun western New South Wales. I have accomplished a spot of wood chip shovelling and garden maintenance, A little video editing, the results of which are embedded below as well as some digital painting and I’ve finally gotten a long running paper-craft project near to completion.

The second episode of my going story reading project. 

Today a box arrived from my mother. A box of art, mostly my art, mostly from ’82-’84. So 35 year old pictures by me the child. The boys and I had a lot of fun going through the box admiring and laughing at the pictures, comparing hand and foot prints to the boy’s and mine now and of course we were then inspired to make some fresh art of our own, which I’ll photograph and share sometime soon. For today here are a couple of the prize pieces:

Bravo indeed.

This particular Sith lord made many appearances.

 

One of the many bulldozer paintings had a treat on the back.


A Brandon Cavallari sketch!

Done
by Kimliatach

 

At long last the final two build videos are up.  First the painting:

Then the part by part display and photo shoot:

Next project is simmering.

 

A visual treat:

 

Back to It
by Kimliatach

The holidays as ever have flown past. We spent five lovely days in Canberra with my mother and step father and a night on the road in each direction, once with family and once at a motel. I’ve logged a bunch of our experiences over at Trip Advisor.  We had some particularly special meals out, saw more than a few museums and galleries and visited all the best playgrounds in town.

After months of talking and circling around ideas, trying to decide where and how we want to live. Including keeping voting tally sheets with pros and cons for each destination on the kitchen cabinets. We have decided that we will stay in Australia. The where in Australia bit remains nebulous, but we are effectively ruling out living in Scotland, Europe or Asia for now. I am still coming to terms with the next bit but it is likely that we will need to stay in Cobar for the duration of 2018 to build capital. Our key criteria in looking for a place to buy and build are quality school for the boys, proximity to family, proximity to a capital, affordability, proximity to wilderness, mountains, sea as well as climate stability, vulnerability and habitability. Nowhere meets all needs.

I’ve started a list of every good or interesting state or alternative school in Australia. As expected apart from a few really exceptional state schools I hadn’t encountered before, it is a pretty short list at the moment. I’m hopeful of being able to add more before we begin narrowing it down.

I’ve resolved to devote more effort to developing my creative abilities to combat the latent ennui of life out here. Finishing things is critical to progress for me and today I finally put finishing touches on two projects that have been lingering on my drive for years and months respectively. Both are being used for T-shirt design competitions the first is here on Threadless.

The second will go up on Woot! for a relevant competition opening there early tomorrow morning. Link to follow. Edit: It seems the relevant WOOT comp wont open until Thursday.

 

Votes are greatly appreciated on both. As with many such sites the winning entries get about $1k US, some store credit and a portion of all sales for the life of the design on the site.

Tomorrow is the first day of term 2 for me, though my student wont be back until Wednesday. As Tuesday is ANZAC day Monday is student free and hopefully productive.

 

Catchup
by Kimliatach

A rough draft of the Black order set

Teaching myself Tinkercad so as to be of use as a teacher of it for my students, who will be learning the program so that the 3D printer can be put to work. It is a basic and quite powerful modelling program. The controls are a little bit idiosyncratic and it has a tendency to dump the user back the main menu when doing hard operations, though it has so far not lost progress doing so. My first self set challenge is an Order vs Chaos chess set.

I splashed out and bought a couple of rolls of printing filament from these guys mid week so that I can get some personal printing done at work guilt free.

On Saturday N and I made the Dubbo run leaving the children with grandparents. A shockingly expensive shopping and very long drive later we made it home safe and have cupboards chock full with food and a shed full of timber and paints for projects.

I’ve been commissioned to build a set of portrait photography boxes and among the supplies purchased were two sheets of 12mm ply cut down to fit in the car. This project provided me with the first opportunity to put my mitre saw to use and my what a pleasure that machine is. All pieces are cut and ready for building and I even ripped down some off cuts to make parts for a nesting box. Assembly to happen later in the week.

Tuesdays are staff and year level meetings each week, meaning that I am usually not home until near six. I have found out that there is a Judo class on from Seven in the school hall on Tuesday evenings. I would like to attend but the mental hurdle of returning to work is a big obstacle. Wish me luck.

 

A few links to share from the last few days:

A beautiful representation of the causes of Global Warming.

Finalists of the Smithsonian Photo Competition

Do Want: Colour 3D Printed scale models of astronomical bodies.

I periodically return to the works of Simon Stålenhag (Sale site) Disturbing, fantastical and somehow totally believable they conjure a deeply uncomfortable alternative world. Someday I’ll commit and buy a print. I just haven’t settled on which yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maths Planning
by Kimliatach

For reasons unclear theses images simply would not attach to yesterdays post. All made using the machine learning AI painter Dreamscope.

A real flayed man leaping from Bodyworlds using the Greek Urn filter.

A real skeleton from Bodyworlds using the Picasso filter

Old and new cylons eye to eye using the Van Gogh filter

As I said yesterday I don’t feel that it has yet produced a truly extraordinary work for me like some I have seen. But it is entertaining and pretty incredible.

N didn’t make the Dubbo run today but likely will tomorrow. Instead we took a swim, sheet mulched cat heads int he garden and played games, real imaginary and computer and whiled the day away.

This evening I’ve made more planning progress on my maths programs in which I have two separate groups and topics to cater to. I take the top maths rotation which is mostly my class sans the year fours and a few more from the other 5/6’s. With that group for three to four hours a week we forge ahead in the number strand using the NSW year 6 and 7 syllabus as a guide, but with a whole lot more physical and creative based learning activities as well as some solid traditional bookwork and problem solving practise. For forty minutes each day I also take maths for my whole class and it is during this time I am expected to cover all the other strands of maths; Chance, Data & Statistics, Geometry and Measurement.

This is not enough time and so of course I am doing my best to cross pollinate ideas and build actually useful skills. For instance as a significant portion of all our classes were away for an inter-school swimming carnival during my last lesson. I taught circles to the upper rotation. It being very apparent that most had never used a compass before and even those who had, were never given explicit instruction into how to not mess it up every time. We will be building on that session in the week ahead when we will create pie charts to illustrate the common fractions using compasses and protractors. All this in the hope that by the time we get to angles a few weeks down the line we can move beyond classifying angles and into the elements in short order.

Ready
by Kimliatach

As ready as I’m going to get anyway. Cleaning and laminating at school consumed much of the day. All the important stuff is done and the room is now clean and tidy, awaiting a tornado of students. Tomorrow I become one of the new most import people in 28 children’s lives for the next 11 months.

Tonight I have been playing with this auto colouring tool. Which produces spectacularly weird results. Note that in the image below I only gave it eye colour to work with for the Vodyanoi on the right.

Lots of typography work over the last couple of days making word wall headers, name labels and drawer labels to suit my needs. As well as some general teaching aides for the smooth functioning of my room:

 

 

Last thing to share today is this Bonobo clip that I have revisited twice now. It really is just supurb.

 

The Big Clean
by Kimliatach

Preparing for the term ahead by sorting, repacking and cleaning each area of the house systematically.
Today emphasis was on our front storage room which had, due to repeated rummagings by both myself and the boys, deteriorated. Also contended with laundry and toys throughout the house. A good start, but the Shed/ Laundry, mud room, back porch and study all remain. In addition to some yard maintenance and mucking out the hen house.

The heat as always lately was intense, so we hid for a time in the aircon and I took the time to work on timeline labels, the number of which is now well and truly out of hand. Repairing a number of items of clothing and a faulty door lock. Also a couple of new classroom posters:

Ready for lamination. I have others waiting for access to a colour printer.