Blogs
Gearing up for a little fun
My good fiend calls his studio the Imaginarium. I wanted to make him a sign that had some resemblance to a skeleton watch but simpler. The design had some limitations as the finished piece had to travel inside a suitcase. My friend lives in Hawaii. I first did a quick scribble in my sketchbook to work out the basic idea.
Golf sign start
We are slowly working our way through a big list of signs for Skallywag Bay. The next major sign on the list is for the adventure golf. The routed signs are actually the smaller portion of the project. Just the same the main sign was both challenging and fun. The first task was to commit the design to vectors
United Cheese Steaks Of America – Food Truck – Oh Yeah!
Be prepared – they are coming to your town! This is our latest wrap for United Cheese Steaks Of America food truck. So this is where we start. We need to make this thing amazing – Its up to Nanette our designer to work with the client to come up with a design that will stop people in the tracks (and make them hungry). This truck is incredible inside and their food is amazing so the wrap has to live up to all of that and convey it! For the graphic production we use the Avery EZ RS Supercast Vinyl with the Avery DOL 1060 cast premium overlaminate film.
Get KRAKEN!
The last ride sign is for the Kraken’s Crew (bumper boats). I decided to go for the life preserver look with the KRAKEN peeking through. I whipped up some simple vectors which wold be used to create the reliefs/ I first used the extrude function to create a mesh object. Then I used the teardrop vector to create the body of the KRAKEN
Skull Rock sculpt done
It doesn’t take much hand sculpting to make a sign go from mildly dimensional to off the wall different. In the case of the Skull Rock Scramble sign it looked pretty good with just the random shape, the texture and raised lettering. Adding Webster, the turtle Gruffle changed it in a big way without a doubt and he took only a couple of hours to create.. (This time includes my helper’s time.) But we weren’t nearly done yet. I spent another twenty minutes with our air powered die grinder to extend the gnarly rock texture around the sides, top and bottom of the sign.
Still “Frozen” this Christmas…
Once again we had the great fortune to work on the “Frozen” display at the Disney Store in Times Square. This was a lot of fun as usual and my daughter Mary got to meet Olaf in person! The client gave us sketches of the Frozen Castle and our challenge was to make a display out of acrylic. We came up with a few concepts and started building it half scale to work out the kinks. Once we had the design down it was time to build it full size which was about 8′ tall. Here is the main structure made out of gator foam.
Topographical modeling in 3D
I’ve wanted to use the router to do a topographical map for some time. As we get into the build of the Trinidad project I’ve been having some difficulty in describing the elevations of the site to the various people involved. The grades are somewhat complex without a doubt. I had done a color keyed 2D topographical map to explain things and it certainly helped.
Scrambling turtle
The sign routed up beautifully. I welded up a frame and then laminated it inside. While the glue was setting I cut a turtle shape from some Precision Board and then did a quick sculpt of the shell. This was allowed to harden. A half inch step rod poked out of the bottom center as well as 1/4″ rods for each leg
Rock on!
The largest feature of Skallywag Bay Adventure Park is now under construction. It is being prefabricated by RockWerx in their studio. It will then be cut into pieces and transported to the site to be reassembled there.