Pattern Design at Mass Art

I took a pattern design class at Mass Art this semester to understand fabric better. It was very useful.

Here's my final project.





The wire forming the bottom part of the skirt definitely need to be stiffer, but the only other wire I had that was suitable was way too stiff and thick to work comfortably with the fabric.



At the very end of the project the piece managed to discover a pen in my office. I could either patch it or go with it -- I went with it.

Casting Fun

Just finishing up a cast using a mold made with Body Double silicone rubber.

It is pretty amazing stuff, and, even though it was my first time using it, the results will suit my needs.

Here's some shots of the cast made from the mold






and the cast supporting the suiting material (as part of a future sculpture).







-- Yes, I still need to patch the hole created in the mold by my decision to retain my neck during the molding process.

A few lessons learned

Casting

• Save a little bit of the unmixed Body Double for use after molding. It can be used to repair any tears (unlikely) or bare spots (more likely) in the mold. Given that you'll be doing a few coats of resin without fiberglass, the chances of the casting material bonding to the support are otherwise substantial.


• The silicone is slippery (especially when treated so as to not stick to hair), so first use a few layers of resin/hardener alone without fiberglass to get detail. Without this, the fiberglass won't adhere well enough to the mold to track the shape, even if it doesn't fall off the mold entirely.

Molding

• Trim hair -- this reduces the pain and increases the speed of removing the mold from one's body, but also improves the achievable level of detail.


• Mold in sections. This mold was done standing. In retrospect I would have done the front and back separately while lying down, followed by the arm while standing.
  
  
  Body Double very much doesn't want to stick to your skin. Positioning yourself to allow gravity to hold it in place will increase the overall accuracy and level of detail.
  
  
  


• Don't breathe too deeply -- it will make you look fat!
  

Interesting Tiffen DFX Filter Trick

I've been a fan of the Tiffen DFX Filters ever since version 1 and version 3 is definitely the best yet.

When using them to process some broken glass shots of Detroit (what else!), I ran across this interesting effect if you apply the x-ray filter twice

Original

One application of the x-ray filter

Double application of the x-ray filter

The double filter almost looks like something you could actually see under natural lighting conditions.

Brushes

There's been a lot of buzz lately about the Brushes iPhone app. It is used by David Hockney, was used to generate a cover for the New Yorker and has a bunch of interesting images created with it in a Flickr pool e.g., this one.



I certainly think it has potential, but I haven't warmed to it yet (too busy working on a sculpture, which will hopefully be the subject of my next post).

One thing that I found interesting is that it's treatment of brush overlap was more like Photoshop than a painting program. Namely if you cross over a line without lifting your "brush" (finger in this case) it does not increase the intensity of the line at the point of intersection, unlike the painting programs I'm used to (primarily Corel painter).

Example

Brushes

Painter Pro.

This is probably a good way for brushes to work, since as far as I can tell it would otherwise be hard to create an arbitrary area of uniform color, but it did throw me off on my first attempt.

Tiffen Digital Filters

My photographs normally involve a fair amount of adjustment/enhancement/re-creation in Photoshop. I recently came across the Tiffen dfx plug in filters and wanted to see what they could do with some of the photos that I took last year off of Staten Island.

Here's an example:

First the original

Now "excessively" sharpened

Now with one of the film filters applied

The only reservation I have is that the full filter pack is ~$300 -- I do like the result though.