First comleted item

This is the first completed object of the Confirmation of Practice project, my mother has already commandeered it and put it on her fireplace with a candle in it, it looks good with a candle in it I must admit.

Excuse the bad image it was taken with my phone.

My workspace at the moment.

This is my workspace at the moment, it has recently had a change of imagery so its looking a bit more sparse than I like.

My lovely space.

Me trying to look knowledgeable in my chair.

My favorite object in my space right now is my little laser cut circles that I cut out in the 3D workshop while experimenting with the new awesome laser cutter. 

You cant tell me that these aren't the most awesome thing you have ever seen.

They are super tiny in real life, I almost lost them in my wallet D:

Confirmation of practice project.

The current project I'm getting really stuck into at uni is Confirmation of practice, its aims are to pretty much make anything we want as long as we produce a finished outcome. I have been focusing on my favorite inspirations, black holes and fluorescent colours for ideas in this project and so far have created several maquettes which translate my ideas into a 3 dimensional form.

Cardboard cutout, can you guess what my inspiration was?

Aluminium

Brass wire brush, looks better than  I originally anticipated.

  

Inspiration: Flourescent

 For as long as i can remember i have been obsessed with fluorescent colours, if it glowed under an ultraviolet light I had to have it. as time passed I collected loads of little objects that where fluorescent but ended up throwing them out after I moved to a different bedroom in the house, I regret it. Recently I have rediscovered my obsession but this time I have been creating my own fluorescent pieces of work instead of buying them.

Gas cloud in space painted with fluorescent paint.

 This link contains imagery that I have collected on deviant art.  (Neon favorites folder on deviantart.com) Many I collected for the current project I am doing at university as they reminded me of space scenes.

Piece of forged work incorporating fluorescent perspex.

 Perspex is great, fluorescent perspex is even better. I love light emitting fluorescent Perspex, it adds that colour to everything that people didn't even know was possible. Iv been planning to get my hands on perspex rods for this current project to add that bit of colour to my forged metalwork. 

Inspiration: Black Holes

I'm influenced by spacial anomalies such as black holes or the sorts of things that the Star-ship Enterprise might fly into on Star Trek, they don't have to be real to inspire me. I have always been interested in the science behind the beautiful imagery that's been taken from earth and from space.   Check out this link to the gallery of images from the Hubble Telescope.

Image from http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/blackholes.asp

This image is one of my favorites, the way light is distorted as it travels around the black hole I think is amazing, it reminds me of hot summer days when rising heat distorts the view from my house. Capturing the shapes and the colours seen in distorted light became an obsession recently, because hot metal is bent and distorted so easily its the perfect material for recreating these misshapen forms. 

Pre paint panel.

Here are a few images on the panel before i painted it so you can see how much of a difference it makes.

Acrylic

I seem to get more and more obsessed with chopping acrylic/ Perspex sheet as time goes on.

 A foray into the world of acrylic plastic during high school and then college sparked my interest, I was fascinated by how  malleable the material was when heated and how, as with forging metal, it could be heated so far then be ruined by burning. The really big thing for me is fluorescent acrylic sheet, it glows under UV light and I'm fascinated by its ability to refract light within itself which in turn causes the edges to appear to be glowing.

The above image is a piece I made while exploring the material in college. I found I could exploit the glowing edges and create something that had shapes accentuated by light throughout. This is something I'm itching to combine with forged metal, not only the glowing edges but also just the bold colours of the acrylic itself.

The above image was taken with no flash using a UV black-light as the light source, it's hard to take an image like this without the proper photography equipment hence the blurriness though you get a good sense of the fluorescence. This was my first attempt at combining forged steel and perspex I think the outcome is great though the process gave me a feel for how much hassle it is to combine the two materials using different methods.