"The Rockman & I"

Apparently, I made the headlines recently:

(click to enlarge)

I apologize for not continuing with the "Rockman, Shmockman" series, but there would've been endless amounts of mindless & downright dull things to cover. So, I'll cut to the chase & get to the point.

We worked night & day to complete this thing on time for graduation. But during the last two weeks, there was a falling out between ourselves & a few reps from the school board. I don't blame 'em. There's always politics of some kind coming up when discussing donations.

The school wanted us to put the sculpture on a concrete sidewalk on the side of the school, since parents & kids who drive into the parking lot in the back would see it on the way in or out. But upon inspecting the site, my father & I discovered that the spot was unsafe, since the plate the Rockman is welded to was too big to fit & the sidewalk itself was severely slanted & too steep. It would've been an accident waiting to happen. At that point, we decided to place it in a spot where it would be more level & safe from tipping over. The night before graduation, we plopped it on the lawn in front of the main entrance & left.

The next morning, dressed for graduation, I noticed dozens of people crowding around ol' Rocky, admiring it & taking pictures with it. For a while I stood in the background watching people look at it, until a friend of mine congratulated me on it, where everyone overheard him & then crowded around me. I got in on a few pictures, answered a barrage of questions & accepted many compliments & thank-you's from teachers, parents, kids & soon-to-be graduates like myself. My father was in on all the action, too.

After the ceremony, I was interviewed by the Herald (my local paper) & had my picture taken with my creation. You can view some of the pics here at the photographer Kathy Liestner's website.

-

-Later on that day we took Rocky back to our shop, where he has remained since. We have some high hopes for him finding a permanent home, but for now he's on guard duty at the shop.

-

-I'm still getting stopped on the street because of him. I'm not really used to this kind of attention. Although it feels great knowing somebody out there likes what I have done & knows of my art, I don't wanna get hooked on it, since it probably won't last too long. My 15 minutes of fame will soon be over.

-

-At least this project is finally done! Now I can look forward to my NEXT project (Oh boy...)! See ya around!

Not-So-Important News

Not much goin' on lately... sleeping... eating Reese's Puffs... watchin' TV... graduating high school... goin' to the movies... you know, little things.



If you can't understand sarcasm, shame on you.



This past Sunday was graduation, & it was a long but exciting day (those two things never go together usually). Got my diploma, had a little get-together at my place, normal graduation-type stuff.

As you can see in this picture, the Rockman is complete (I apologize for the upteenth time for not posting the next "Rockman, Shmockman" installment). I got some kudos & pats on the back from a bunch of people, but more on that in a future post.




There's nothing better than relaxing, chatting with friends & family, eating BBQed food & having the heavy burden of high school lifted off my shoulders (no more 50lb. backpacks for me!).



No I have all the time in the world to hang out, make some extra dough & go places... OH! & to post on my blogsite, of course!



I'll see ya next time around!

Rockman, Shmockman Part Three: "Head Trauma"

Before I begin to talk about how we made the head, let me first comment on how we decided on which Rockman to make:

Even though The Thing himself is technically a human in form, we were able to take a few liberties on how tall, wide & large he is because of how many styles/versions/incarnations the character has gone through over the years. You can see how many different kinds of Things there are below:

As you can see, each Thing is completely different from another. In some, the hands are enormous & the head is tiny, others have jaws & brows protruding out more & some of the Thing's muscles are so large he looks like a sumo wrestler. & these are only a few of them! When deciding on which version of the character to use for the sculpture, we decided to go with the classic 60's Thing like in the picture below.

Once we got the design downpat, we were able to start construction.

Along with the hands, the head was probably the biggest pain in the ass. Like in all paintings, photos, & in this case sculptures, the face is the first (if not the only) part that the observer focuses on with the most concentration. If the head is even slightly "off-model", it will throw off the rest of the piece, especially if it's supposed to be a human one.

Now it's time for the juicy stuff:

We decided to start off with a metal ring since that is what the head is shaped like (duh). Using various lengths of metal rod, we estimated where the eyes, jaw & brow would be on the head, as well as how wide & how deep it is.

In this picture, I am heating & bending the mouth into shape. Here, the mouth is nearly as wide as the head itself. My father & I both believed later on that he looked too much like a fish, so we chopped the mouth in thirds, threw out the middle piece & reattached the ends to make a smaller, better looking mouth like this:
At first, we added the nuts just for reference on where the eyes would be positioned. Eventually we kept them in. Why?... 'cause it looks good.

After we reinforced the wireframe...

...& shaped the eye sockets, mouth & cheeks...
...we began to plate the head:

Like the hands, the face/head was extremely difficult to work around. Even though there aren't as many nooks & crannies as the hands, it still filled us both with frustration.

It took us about 3-4 hours to get to this point:

& another 2-3 to plate the rest. We then added a temp. nose made out of an old pipe connector & VOILA! The head was done!

-Now that the hands, feet & head were complete, it was now time to start making a body to put them on. More on that next time! Stay tuned!

Rockman, Shmockman: Part 2

Continuing where I left off, the Rockman project was on hold for about 3 & 1/2 years.

I realized around the end of my junior year that the deadline was coming up fast, in a little less than a year. I finally got off my ass & dragged the half-finished wireframe out of cargo container hell & back on the workbench. But after some observation, my father & I noticed that the wireframe was way off than we originally thought, so we basically started from scratch. Before we began on the construction of the legs, arms & torso, we felt that it would be easier to get the harder stuff out of the way first, so we started with the hands, the feet & the head.



In 2002, I got those foam toy Hulk hands as a birthday gift from my mom. Later I thought that they would make great templates for the Rockman's fists. With some careful measurement & close comparison, we made nearly identical metal fists. They were probably the hardest pieces to make out of the whole project because the fists had so many wrinkles, bends, ridges, gaps, nooks & crannies to plate over.


*Notice - although the date on the pictures say October 17th, 2006, the hands were actually fabricated in early July. These pictures were taken the day we finished the feet.


We actually made each hand a different way. For the left fist (right in the pictures) we used metal pipes cut to certain lengths & angles that were the same width as the fingers of the foam hands. This ended up being very difficult, so we decided to make the other hand a wireframe using thin rods. This was was not only a lot easier to make, but also a lot easier to plate over.

Unknowingly at the time, we stumbled across a huge problem. Before we began to plate the second hand, we noticed that the pipe hand was slightly but obviously bigger than the wireframe hand. But using our creative ingenuity, we fixed the problem by bending a few rods & bulging the plates out. With the plates, they ended up weighing around 25 pounds each.


Next up were the feet. Since the feet had to hold up all the weight of the sculpture, we built the feet around thick support rods & worked our way out. Compared to the hands, the feet were a cake walk. We got through the feet in a fraction of the time the hands took us. Plating was a cinch & everything seemingly worked out for the best. But confidence got the better of us, & we faced another problem:

One ankle was wider than the other.

I thought: "How could we miss something like this? We gotta fix it!"

Then my dad said: "Fuck it. We'll fix 'em when we get to the legs, that's all."

& we did.

The feet were finished. Due to the support rods, the feet ended up weighing about 45-50 pounds each. For size comparison, I placed one of my dad's size 11 boots in between the feet. Pretty large feet, huh?

-To finish today's post, here are some more pictures of the feet & hands:

& a post-it note drawing, too!

In the next chapter, I'll discuss the making of the Rockman's head & the problems we faced along the way. See you tomorrow!

Rockman, Shmockman

Out of everything that I have done, this is probably my biggest accomplishment. Out of all the drawings, paintings & cartoons in my portfolio, this is what I to believe as the one thing that got me into SVA: Behold my masterpiece!

Well, kinda. Actually, this is what it looked like when I first started.

My father, the welding expert, taught me how to weld when I was still in elementary school. For hours he tutored me in heating, bending, curling & fusing metal together to create sculptures.

Here was one of my first ones:

I spent about 1 1/2 to 2 hours on this stupid foot thingy. I made it for my Cross-Country team. When I brought it to school the next day, guess how many people cared... none. Not my friends, not my teachers, not my teammates, not even my coach. Insensitive bastards.

But I still kept at it. I began to master it as I went on. I made a few wind vanes here & there, but besides that there was nothing else to really make. But then I had an idea.

Before I continue, let me just say that my school is pretty cheap. Dirt cheap to be precise. It so poor that on several occasions we ran out of paper. PAPER! No booklets, no worksheets & no drawing paper for days on end. Plus, we're a pretty unknown town. Our town is so small, it's not even listed on most maps.

Back to the story... I thought that out school needed something to help it stand out, but I didn't know what should be done. That's when I saw this picture in one of my "how-to-draw" books:

The Thing! Our school mascot is the Thing (technically it's Rockman to avoid copyright infringement). My tiny, young, 7th grade mind thought "If I can make wireframe feet & wind vanes, I can make this baby easy!".

But of course, it was a lot harder than I thought. Making a 6-foot tall heavily muscled man out of metal isn't easy, or a picnic for that manner. Luckily, my father warmed up to the idea & decided to help me build it.

We made a wireframe (the one at the top of the page) in about two 3-hour sessions. But because my father is a very busy guy & I had schoolwork to do & grades to pass, the project was postponed 'til further notice. From 8th grade all the way to 11th, that wireframe was crammed in a cargo container behind a pile of old junk, rusting to dust.

In the next few days, I'll continue the story of the building process. I'll include pictures & drawings along the way. Come back tomorrow for Part 2!