Ruff Start

Today's photos brought to you by the Darkstrider-stop-motion-patrol-of-joy-Unibrain-web-cam (story below) Today I took a cardboard tube length and positioned it where I wanted the cottage roof's high point to be. Then I grabbed miscellaneous hardwood mini-beams and placed them at all the junctures of walls with globs of Funtac®, with the other ends meeting back at the tube for drinks.
Hey, here's something funny... The other night when Paul and I were working on re-doing the design for his newest co-authored book, we got in a temporary heated spat over the situation, silly but that's what happened. Silly-er is that during this noisy discussion I ripped the buds out of my ears and violently threw my transistor radio down dramatically onto the floor whilst cursing. This caused my trusty dear Nikon CoolPix 950 with the broken battery hatch and creamy, wonderful natural light capturing ability to thunder down after it. The next day the little guy told me it was over (the camera--not Paul!) by click click clatter clunking when I turn it on (again, talking about the camera.) Now here's the silly-est part... the subject of the book, yep, you got it, finding inner peace.

I couldn't get Framethief to compress frames either, kept getting an error, so ended up taking screen shots of the feed. It was difficult to position the little cam and harder still to focus from across the room (I even tried looking back at the screen with binoculars--I'm not too proud to admit it.) I couldn't get to the opposite side of the set with the firewire cord so, until I get a replacement camera, I can't show you how cute the roof looks from over there. Each side of the set has totally different proportions of Mouse and Squirrel--I mean Tree and Cottage. From the side you see here, it looks like a giant house with an obscured tree at its side. But from the other two sides, it looks like a huge magical storybook Answer Tree grown into Rana's little cozy cottage.

I'll next need to get a load of cheap wooden lathing strips to hot-glue onto the beams, as quickly sketched in the bottom photo. Then will come mostly shingles made from cut and stained wooden shims.
Tonight I made my first sketch of the Tarn character. Her sculpture is well underway from several months back--but I have worked out a few things about how I'd like to marry a human woman's figure to a crow's and thought I might sketch it out. It was a very helpful exercise for me as the proportions of the two creatures are dramatically different. The crow's head is relatively huge for its body and yet I was certain I wanted the character's nose, chin, and mouth to relate in this way. I also discovered that she might like to have a wing-like attitude to her one human style arm.

A sketch for Yanu's hooha coming this week as well!