Saturday, January 2, 2010

"...and that anger is a blocked wish." No Really!










Ok, so Paul Vitti was talking to Primo Sadone at the time, and I don`t really do angry blocks. I still think Paul had a good thread going there for a second. The idea of a blocked wish, killer, I mean I knew you could block hats. Anyway it was a while before a block that really set off the quote, but the Kelly-Hamlin (with replacement Oop) is a hunk-o-wish that should be hard to stuff inna box.

Every block so far has been a wish as soon as it was penciled, and a drum roll till it was burned in. Lest you think I`ve taken these little miracles for granted, I have been stunned and a bit amazed that so many have turned out cool enough to save. I started figure blocks to relieve the grind of the arithmetic blocks. I used the reject blocks to experiment on. A few came out so cool that I had to fix them, and re-evaluate what a block could be. It was these early successes that got me draggin around a sack-o-blocks and a pencil, in case I found something cool to put on one.

Some begun with no plan, burned so well I was hesitant to add anything off the cuff to fill the empty faces. Then came the 17-Fish block followed by the Pin-Up block, an innocent enough wish that bit me a couple of places I`d rather not remember.

These weren't lonely for long. A big coffee-table book, "Visions Of The American West" inspired "The West" and the supplementary "Indian Tribal Art" series that began with a face per tribe on the first two. The series continued to open out with addition the of "The Olmec", a possibly too scary block including the were-jaguar mask and an altar support figure. The Escher-Cairo-Penrose tiling block was the first of a tiling series temporarily on hold, waiting for even cooler blocks to get outta the way.

Re-energized by the discovery that an inch-ana-half square fills up quick, I moved boldly into the second arithmetic-block set, sorta, about a third of the way through. What?, did somebody say pantograph? There`s a reason these things aren't everywhere. Granted, mine came out interesting. It took the better part of three days to get it going and required the making of templates (I used Gimp and a little Photo shop), several hours worth. It took too long to find it again, but here`s the instructions and pattern I used to make the pantograph pictured last post.


I liked a lot of the ones I found while trying to find this one again but this plan did produce a working model, and the plan called for yard-sticks. I used round head slotted 10-32 x 1-1/2 machine screws (I bought 10, used 5). I also got 12 extra nuts (stacked to make em lock, over and under) and 30 washers, galvanized like the rest. The total cost including the 3 yard-sticks was $6.33 at The Home Despot.