Holi Festival of Colors

A tale in photos of the adventures of Kelsey, Kristin, Jessie, and Camille.

Bronze Casting

A couple weeks ago I was given a small sheet of wax and told to mold it into something that would then be cast into bronze. I eventually decided to make a small dragon. The wax was surprisingly hard to work with though, as you had to keep it in hot water so that it was soft enough to work with. Naturally my hands did not appreciate this, but that's ok. I'm sure all the great artists suffered some.

Here is the wax model:

Over the last couple weeks the TA for my class prepared our wax figures for the bronze. He built a sort of tree with the figures attached by small tubes to a larger central tube with a cup at the top. He then dipped this whole thing into slurry and sand repeatedly to build up an outer shell. Then this was placed in a kiln so that the wax melted out.

This is when it started getting exciting. The professor that was helping us opened this stone container thing that was heating up the crucible of bronze. Instantly it felt like the front half of me was almost on fire. Then he pulled out the crucible and I felt like I was down with the orcs in Lord of the Rings. Basically it was awesome.

Then he and our TA poured the molten bronze into each of the tree things I mentioned before.

They poured the extra bronze into this mold, which I later discovered, they will just remelt later. Nifty huh?

We had to wait an hour for the bronze to cool and then we had to chip away the outer shell to reveal the bronze. My dragon is somewhere on the closer tree.

It was a pretty awesome process to watch and participate in. We should be getting our figures back next week, after they cut them apart and get them cleaned up.

What is this world coming to?

I stopped by one of the bathrooms in the Wilk to powder my nose, and was met by this little mechanical wonder:

Yes. That is an automatic toilet paper dispenser. Now you may be asking yourself, why are these not installed in every bathroom in the world? I will tell you: because I cannot think of a more pointless invention. I can think of about a hundred things that I would like to be automatic before "toilet paper dispenser" ever comes to mind (perhaps that was a slight exaggeration, but still, the point is that this is ridiculous).

If it really is getting too difficult for people to pull the toilet paper out of the dispenser themselves, I foresee some problems in the future of humanity.

Batman Birthday Party

Recently I was recruited to play a villain at a batman birthday party for my friend Brenda's son. I'm pretty sure this party is every eight year old boy's dream. The kids were agents in training and had to practice the skills they learned by fighting and catching the villains. I was the Riddler and was attacked by children while robbing a bank with Mr. Freeze.

Here I am with Harley Quinn and Batman.

And here we are with the party-planner, Brenda:

I'll probably recruit her when I have children to plan their birthday parties.

Bright Star

Recently in one of my humanities classes we were discussing romantic poetry, which naturally included discussions of Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. Personally I was most drawn to John Keats' poetry and thus chose to write my paper on his poem, "Bright Star."

Coincidentally, last year the movie Bright Star came out and I remember Megan and I thought about seeing it, but then never got around to it. Since then I have wanted to see it, and as I read Keats' poetry it dawned on me that this poem was what inspired the name of the movie, so I added it to my netflix queue and watched it tonight.


I have to say that this movie may have just become one of my favorites. I feel like I say that a lot, but that's only because lately I have seen a lot of really great movies. The love story was so real and believable, and Ben Wishaw, who played John Keats was beyond adorable. I only wish that I could have been born in the romantic era to have perhaps switched roles with Fanny Brawne. The movie is full of Keats' poetry, along with many of the love letters that the couple exchanged. It brought a real and passionate life to the poetry I had merely enjoyed before.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

The Art Update

A couple weeks ago we started egg tempera in my art class. This was a common way of painting back before oil paints became all the rage (we're talking back in medieval times with Cimabue and Giotto). So how paint in general works is you mix a pigment with a binder. In the case of egg tempera the binder is egg yolk.

This required me to take an egg, remove the egg whites and then move the yolk from one hand to the other until most of the slime was gone. Then you are supposed to pick the yolk up carefully by the little sack and hold it over a cup and poke it so that the yolk pours out, but the little sack part doesn't. It didn't quite work that gracefully when I did it, but nonetheless I got the yellow goop out of the sack successfully in the end.

Then you take the yolk in the cup and mix some of it with an equal amount of pigment. Then you grind it around in a little mortar and pestle thing so that each particle of pigment is fully coated in binding.

Then you paint with it in little tiny strokes. You can't really blend egg tempera because it dries almost instantly, which is why our professor had us paint a color wheel with it. It's not finished yet, we need to paint gray around it still (but you can see it in the background of one of the lower pictures).

Last week we started our oil paintings. This is another medium I had never worked with. Our assignment was to paint a still life of the bottles set up in the middle of the room, but in grissaille (which is a fancy term for gray-tone). Instead of using black and white though, we used white and raw umber, which is more like a warm dark brown.

First we had to sketch out whatever part of the still life we were painting in charcoal. Here's what I came up with:

Then we started painting away. Here's what I have so far, though it is not finished. It's a little harder to think in black and white than I thought it would be, but it's looking pretty cool so far (at least I think so). Keep in mind it's my first oil painting ever.