Eva Funderburgh

Here in Seattle, we’ve been snowed in since last Thursday.  We’ve gotten a total of nine inches, with another couple predicted tonight.  In most cities, this would be no problem.  However, the city of Seattle has about 25 snowplows - less snow removal capability the the SeaTac airport.  Even as the city’s been warming up, the roads have been freezing again every night in to two inch thick sheets of ice.  Between that, the city’s use of sand (not salt), and the fact that no one up here knows how to drive in the snow, we’ll probably be stuck here until New Years.  Well, at least I’ve been staying useful.

I recently got myself a scanner (well, maybe it was an early Christmas present), and have been enjoying the heck out of it.  I’ve gone through my old sketchbooks, finding interesting sketches to scan.  I made one or two nice prints for people, recreations of early sketches of critters they now own.  I’ll upload a few more sketches the next few weeks.

I also took the time to finally finish up another time lapse video.  This the the video for the creation of “Conversation #3″.  The music from the soundtrack to “Paprika”, a truly bizarre and spectacular anime movie by Satoshi Kon.  I recommend going to youtube to watch the timelapse in higher resolution.

Of course, I haven’t just been spending the last week hard at work.  I’ve also been relaxing, making and eating a number of cookies, sledding down our street on a piece of cardboard, and introducing our cats to snow.

Happy Holidays everyone!

In addition to using some of my new found free time to sign up for an “Anything-goes Art Event”, I also put together another bit of stop motion.  I recommend going to youtube, where it is possible to click on the “view in higher quality” option.

When I work on my regular sized beasts, I tend to make them in batches.  I’ll start with about 3 to 6 balls of clay, and work on them in parallel over the course of a few weeks.  Often each step in the process of making a beast will only take an hour to half hour, but I’ll need to let the parts rest and dry for a day between each step. This makes sure that seems don’t reopen or wet legs don’t get attached to dryer bodies.  I’ll often spend a morning or a day doing nothing but making legs or sanding backs.

Before the last firing, I decided to track a whole group of critters as I made them.  I started with a bag of clay and ended up with Beast with a Ball, Flatout Beast, Mournful beast with horns, the papaya beast, and the two stilt beasts having a conversation.  This last week I finally got around to putting together most of the timelapse footage, and have four new videos for you.

Papaya Beast

Flatout Beast

Beast with a Ball

Mournful Beast with Horns

I find it very amusing to watch the clues as to the progression of time: What I’m wearing, what color bandana I have, if I have a soda, and how messy my work area has gotten.

Since the quality of the Youtube version of the unloading was so poor, I decided to uploaded to Vimeo, one of the many competitors that keep popping up.  It had its share of frustrations as well in the upload process, but I’m much happier with the final video.

Unloading an Anagama from Eva Funderburgh on Vimeo.

I broke my camera (a Canon SD700) a bit ago and replaced it with a SD850. It’s the exact same camera, but with more megapixels, and, as I discovered, a time lapse video mode. I’m pretty excited about this, and have been making timelapse videos of making sculptures. This is my first one.

This is the process of putting teeth into a big guy that I was making. He’s since turned into CityBeast 2.0, a bigger and more elaborate version of an earlier sculpture. The video covers a hour and forty minutes, as I make the teeth, arrange them, and then secure them. Following is my second video experiment.

That was just just put together with the tools I had on hand (Windows Movie Maker). I’m not completely happy with the captioning, but it’s still pretty fun, all in all. I’ve since had time to follow some creatures from start to finish with the camera. I just need to sort the video and put it together, which I’ll hope to do sometime in the next few weeks. You can be sure that it will be here once it’s done!