I finally put a lot of photos of my more Steampunk-styled pieces into a gallery. There is a tab at the top of this page, but you can also click right here.

I do other styles, but Steampunk is in demand right now. I will expand the gallery later, but I have 18 images so far!

I have decided that I am going to start saving the money I get from commissions, in order to buy a quad-line stunt kite…

I’ve been busy lately!
I have been sculpting a lot, and even trying to sketch a bit.
I promise to show you soon. Er, maybe I shouldn’t promise.
But I will definitely try.

Amazingly, the Mech Dragons are starting to catch on! I really planned to have a pile done to take to OddMall this fall, but I have to start figuring out how to make them more quickly, because I am not doing a good job keeping up at the moment. If you are interested in commissioning one, please let me know!  {Email glimmer @ glimmerville.com is a good way}

Mech Dragon No. 3

Worserly, I am not keeping up with the Ladies Bible Study at church. But I AM keeping up with the “read through the Bible in a year” program – which I highly encourage you all to try. I have discovered some really interesting things, and it’s really helpful to read through the sweep of scripture and not just take it a verse at a time. It all fits together better this way.

Mech Dragon No.2

I finally finished this guy! (Click for a larger view.) Not only that, but he’s sold! I’m excited about both of those things, but he was more work than I expected. He started with a tinfoil and wire base, then I added Sculpey, and Apoxie Sculpt on certain parts (like the horns and the inner wing core supports).

The necklace I started in the last post is “mostly done” – I say “mostly” because I didn’t actually figure out the best clasp yet. But I could take a photo of the front anyway!

Mechanum Sidereal (it needed a good name)

I know a few of you people who read this are artist/crafters, and a few of you people like to see how artists/crafters do things. So I will show you a couple of status shots of a work-in-progress.

First, I found something weird that was on sale, and bought it. It turned out to be grungeboard (which is by Tim Holtz, available at fine scrapbooking stores everywhere). It comes cut up into shapes, or not – and covered with texture, or not.

Here is a random photo I pulled off of the web, because I was too lazy to go upstairs and take a photo of my actual package.

Anyway it turns out this stuff is fascinating and versatile, and smells like basement mold. Or, at least, the package I bought does. But anyway, you can paint it, you can bend it, you can cut it – it’s fun!

So I made up ten little tiles, using layers of paint, brads, gears, etc.

And they look like this:

 But what am I going to do with ten tiles? I thought about putting magnets on the back, or pin backs on them, or make them into thumbtacks. Or something. But instead I have put rivets through them all (actually 9 of 10), and am going to make them into a necklace. It isn’t done, but here is the beginning of my idea:

I find I have been doodling some cute junk in the corners of my church notes. (But seriously, I have been paying attention while doing it! Really!)

Should I cross post any of these to my deviantart page? I kinda like ‘em, the silly things.

So anyway, I hope you are having a pleasant Spring Monday – maybe my silly doodles will distract you from the Monday blahs for 30 seconds! Actually I am working on one “complicated” project. It is taking a long time due to requiring many, many coats of paint and glaze. I hope to be done soon. I really hope.

I have been trying to do more life drawing and more exercising. Both train different muscles. I’ve only been at it for a week, and it just kills me to think of doing exercise for the rest of my life (though yes, I know I need to), so my goal is to work at it until May when I have my next doctor’s appointment, to see if I can lose any weight since the one I had in March. I have my doubts. But even if my clothes fit better and the scale doesn’t say I lost weight, that’d be a great result, to me! I can’t tell you how many outfits I own that I just don’t quite like the look of…

I promised JB that I would add a post tonight, “with art or something,” because this page lacks content. Actually this was predicated by the fact that my web hosting plan is ending so I need to renew. This seems to cost a lot, when I think of how much this site has done for me over the last two years. Then I realize that for about 20 of those months I left the site blank and I realize that I’m just a doofus.

So, for your entertainment, I have captured and sketched the elusive Garjubble, a chubby little fantasy fish of the warm shallow seas.

The Elusive (and cute) Garjubble

In more disturbing news, I was about to buy some copper sheet (to attempt to make something Steampunk-esque) and discovered that it is being stolen from local craft stores, so I had to ask at the back for them to bring the stash of copper out from the storage area.

That definitely seems like something from a novel.

Steampunkery will be in the works even without the copper (I am too cheap at this time, due to buying my web hosting, see above. And I bought a cabinet, while we’re at it.); I will just resort to making it “copper colored” instead of “copper covered”.  Oh, also I just discovered the exciting and informative contents of Instructables. I named myself Nickleplate there, to further confuse the fact that I use too many online names.  

Also I have decided that Doctor Gestalt is just too masculine to use from here on out, so that blog is not likely to be resuscitated with that name.

I deleted about 60 spam comments on this site, this weekend. I don’t know why I am being bombarded. Amusingly, one began with the word “Hastur”. Perhaps Old Ones are spamming my blog. I will just have to find an anti-spam WordPress plug-in (I think they exist?). [Update: The first spam I received after this entry began with the phrase "please forgive". So that's not creepy at all, then, is it. Hmm.]

I was THIS CLOSE to seeing Coraline over the weekend, but it didn’t work out (as in I then remembered I had a church nursing home service and it’s hard to justify skipping out on visiting widows to go see a movie).

Did anyone see Coraline yet? I did read the book. Next I will have to read The Graveyard Book. Speaking of which, it is the 8th anniversary of Neil Gaiman’s blog, and I suggest you go check it out. It’s excellent.

http://www.neilgaiman.com/

One other dissapointment over the weekend – I found a gift card for my favorite craft store that had already expired in 2007. I feel like I earned negative money over the weekend.

While I’m plugging ineresting websites, let me get in a word for Cabinet of Wonders.  This site is a wonderful (no pun intended) aggregation of information on things true and/or quirky. It’s much better than my blog, so go check it out right now. It has photos! I always intend to have photos, but I usually type this up during lunch at work, and don’t have access to my camera. Not a good excuse at all.

I was looking at some excellent photos of clockwork at the Cabinet of Wonders site, and pondering the whole Steampunk genre, and wondering how clocks actually work, and found this great site that explains the mechanics of, er, mechanisms: http://www.flying-pig.co.uk/mechanisms/ 

I will be looking at that one a lot later today.