Cartoon of the week

I'm going to try to post one of my cartoons each week. Let's see how long I can keep this going.

Sneak peek at new "Jaggedy-Rag" dolls

 

What do you get when you rub a cartoonist and a seamstress together?

Here's a  sneak peek at some of the dolls we're working on at the moment. They're bound for our Etsy.com site, arriving in a week or so, we hope. With Halloween right around the corner, we thought this would be a good time to bring these out. There will be a total of 13 in this series entitled "Jaggedy Rag Dolls". Each will have a name and a short "back story". There will be seven of the masculine persuasion and six feminine. We wanted to create some easy and economic-to-make, but not-too-home-made-looking dolls that would be the kind of thing Wednesday Adams (Adams Family) might carry around. Kind of Creepy-Cute. These are really a continuation of the "Creepy Clown" series I started about 10 years ago. That's why some of them have clown noses or neck ruffles. These dolls are not intended for children, though they are probably safe, but wouldn't stand up to the rigors of play, and they can't be laundered. They are more like the "art-doll" variety. These are all original Tesserak Studios designs. They are all hand made by me and my wife, Ellen Wight. Each is about 10" tall. We used natural and hand-dyed Angora on the ones with real hair. They have an accidental distressed look but we think it looks better than the perfectly printed versions. It makes them look like they've been around for a while. We're thinking of asking for $35 or $40 per doll. 

We'd love to hear what you think, so please let us hear your comments and critiques. Seriously, we're not looking for compliments as much as we're looking for your real first impression. So, come on, tell us what you really think. Also, I'll answer any questions you might have about this series.

My "Jansen" walking mechanism

I like making sculpture that moves or folds or that employ natural forces. I wanted to design a wind-driven sculpture of a horse walking. The wind-driven drive mechanism is simple enough to design but how to make the legs move?
I found this Dutch artist/engineer genius, Theo Jansen and one of the walking mechanisms he designed for one of his "Strand Beasts" (look him up on YouTube, he's amazing). So, I thought I'd try to build one of his mechanisms. I found a picture of one of his linkages and from that I made a drawing, and from that I made measurement and scaled it up. The photo at right shows the result of my prototype build. The prototype in the photo at right is about 11 inches tall. I wanted to see if it would work before I went to all the trouble to cut it all out of metal. I used Popsicle sticks and tongue depressors, a couple longer pieces of thin wood and a circle cut out of thin plywood. I used small steel bolts as linkage pins. It's a little stiff but it does work.
So, what we have here is what would be the linkage mechanism for the right half of a quadruped, front and rear legs. Four linkage arms connect to a peg on the little circle. As the circle turns, it drives the mechanism. This mechanism is designed to have the "feet" on the ground as much as possible for each cycle of the drive wheel. It's gait is not horse-like. It's more like a crab or a spider. But it might work for a stylized sculpture of a walking horse. However, my experiment is a success. I can build one, and it works the way it was designed.
If you had 4, 6, or 8 of these in a chassis, with solar powered electric motors and a little bit of electronics you could build a walking, radio controlled little robot, though steering it might be a problem.

My hand-carved wooden spoons

I saw some home made wooden kitchen implements in an antique store and I thought, "How hard would it be to make one of those?" The answer is: "With a couple of the right tools, it's not easy but it's not extremely difficult". Each one took me about two hours working time over two days. The photo above shows my first three attempts: top to bottom, eucalyptus, birch and cherry. For each one I chose a log from my firewood pile, made a cut length-wise on the outside of the log for the spoon blank. I cut that into the rough shape of a spoon. Then I carved the bowl of the spoon, then the back of the spoon, then the handle. Then there was shaping with a hand rasp and files, and a whole lot of sanding. These spoons haven't been oiled yet. Top to bottom the spoons are 10", 11" and 12" long. I could whip out one of these babies in no time with power tools but I really enjoy making things by hand.
First attempt: eucalyptus was not a good choice. It is hard to carve, splits and cracks easily and not real nice looking wood. And no, eucalyptus wood doesn't smell like cough drops, though the leaves do.
Second attempt: Birch wood is a soft "hardwood". I didn't choose a good piece of this wood from my wood pile; it had insect damage (as you can see on the handle). I went ahead with it anyway. Birch is relatively easy to carve and it is very light. I think this wood is too soft and absorbent to be a good spoon.
Third attempt: I found a nice aged log of cherry wood; a heavy wood,very hard, very nice tight beautiful grain. This wood was a dream to work with. It carves nicely, with good sharp tools, and finishes beautifully. This made a far superior spoon in the end. That's what I'll use on the next one.
So why would I go to all this trouble to make a spoon I can by for a couple of bucks? To see if I could; and I made the other two because I could; and every time I make one, it's better than the last one. Each time I make one I learn something, and at the same time I get better at it. It's a satisfying experience.

Another version of a Tetrahedron Ring

This is a copy of version #5 (I think) of my Tetrahedron Ring series. I think I have about eight different designs for tetrahedron rings. You can see a video of more of these on my YouTube site:
Tesserak Studios YouTube Site

It's made from 1" aluminum angle stock (six pieces) and six steel hinges. Though these six pieces are not tetrahedrons, they are based on two halves of center planes through a tetrahedron, at right angles to each other. I know, that's a little difficult to visualize, but essentially what you see here could be described as the skeleton of half a tetrahedron.
Anyway, what originally interested me about this design is: here is a ring, with each hinge at a right angle to its neighbor yet with this arrangement you can get a toroidal rotation that seems to defy logic.
I don't know of any useful application of this mechanism. However it fits right into my interactive sculpture philosophy; sculpture that you are supposed to play with.

Here's a video of one of these:

My new home made bench

I made this bench out of recycled redwood and cedar lumber. I need a bench for just outside my Restoration Studio office and this project would use up this lumber and free up some much needed space in my shop. The photo above was taken just after completion, before filling and sanding (filling only the worst looking gouges and scars in the old wood). If it didn't already have that ugly "stain" (which is really "stain" colored paint) I'd leave it natural. I'm going to paint it a nice dark "forest green" to match a bunch of other stuff around here that is the same green. It'll look great with two or three coats of paint, and this thing should last for a long time.

The new doll project is proceeding on schedule. Along the way we're learning a lot about design and production of something of this nature. By now, we are way past the fun stage and full into production; by hand, that is; printing, stuffing, sewing, hair dying, etc. Sometimes things don't go as planned and you have to decide if you can use it to your advantage, or go back a step or two and re-do that part. First you love the idea, then you like it again, then you think you're crazy for taking on this project, then you like it again. I just hope we end on a "like it". Anyway, I hope to have some of them finished within a week, and the rest of them a week or so after that. I'll keep you posted.

A new series of soft dolls from Tesserak Studios

We are in the development stage of our next little project; a series of 12 small stuffed dolls. We haven't nailed down a name for the series yet but the one we like so far is "Jaggedy-Rag Dolls" (Ellen's idea). I guess that means I'll have to come up with names and back stories for each one too (groan). We created this series specifically for our new Tesserak Studios shop on Etsy.com. We wanted to make the kind of doll you might find in the Addams Family kid's toy box. Not cute, but not too scary either. Something that doesn't look too homemade. It could be the perfect accessory to your Comic Con costume. Though our dolls will be safe for kids, we didn't have children in mind when we created them.
The Jaggedy-Rag dolls will be based on a doll I designed in 2003 and Ellen made for me in 2006, pictured in the photo shown here. He was part of my clown series of art-dolls. We thought this guy would be something we could make by hand and still keep the price down.
We're thinking this will be a series of 10 or 12, ten-inch dolls. Half of them male, half of them female. Each will be one-of-a-kind. Each will be printed, stuffed and stitched by hand. Some of the faces will be hand painted or drawn. The unique print patterns on each doll are created in-house.
We're well into the design stage at this point. It's been fun working on these designs with Ellen, my sewing genius. We hope to have some finished dolls in about a month. We'll keep you posted . . . in our posts.