The boys Maric, Ben and Gabe covered themselves with clay from under the sands of Lake Superior.

Melanie stars in many of these weeks pix just because she’s so active and gets into absolutely everything that’s worth a picture, and plus she’s cute!. She even picked up the chipmunk and kept petting it long after it had bitten her several times. She’s very fond of animals.

Gabe is shown hunting for amethyst at the mine up the road a bit.

Jess has been teaching the kids how to draw cartoons from pictures and paint them on the wall. Here are some examples from the girls bedrooms taken with an appleIphone. Melanie traced a Tweety Bird onto canvas.

Grandson Gabe, Daughter Tara and Gramps have a little too much fun with the Sepia tone option on the Nikon and Gabe apes the cam even on special effects as in   this picture.

Shaun caught a Crawdad and showed it to the kids. Elizabeth (Liz) looks so realistic in the accident victim makeup but I just can’t remember what they did it for because it’s too early for Halloween. She told me she was looking forward to going back to school and seeing her friends again. Brooklynn is chock full of "Outake Photos" when she isn’t doing calisthenics on the beach.

Jess’s nails are amazing and Melanie outdoes everyone with a one handed flip, on the sidewalk no less. I think Brooklynn taught her that.

This summer has been Hot and Wet and Gramps needs a vent into the bedroom so it was made of old sheet metal and wood and the other pix of it’s making are shown two weeks previous. The blue is the paper patterns for the rusty old steel which was pounded on the anvil to make it like measuring tape with a dished underside then painted with rust paint and house paint.

The shelving for the Kilnshed storage area was made of two Stain display racks and hung on the wall using the plumbers tape brackets show in previous week. Old bowling alley wood which is maple was cut into 3/8" square rods and planed to be good lookin’ to reinforce the edges of the shelves and held on with zip ties and epoxy.

Every year there are a number of local plant pix from the gardens and fields and this year they are being used to compare the cameras. The two green tomato pix in the bottom row are Sony at left and Fuji at right. Enlarge both to see the difference the Sony makes. (Pix name contain an "s", "f" or "n" after date to denote cam used.)

Canada Day has been getting better and better on the Beach with Fireworks in all directions. I was testing out the new Nikon and you can see I messed up majorly but here are some pix anyway. I didn’t hold the camera steady, forgot how to focus, lost the movies I made, forgot to use the fireworks setting but had a ball just the same. Fireworks don’t start till nearly 10 pm and the wine drinking begins at 6 so that explains the pictures.. Hey What?

Cherie and TJ took their tubing to the limit with their buddies and had to swim back to shallow water. You can just barely see them in the Beach Pix previous to their pix. (There is a seagull on a rock and a boat to the left and the little blob above that is them. Next pix is the Nikon tele.. pretty good huh?)

Gramps thought he was having a focus problem with the Nikon that proved to be a mental problem with reading instructions. At the time it was a good enough excuse to buy the Sony a390 so you will notice in the recent weeks the pix names have "f" for Fuji, an "n" for Nikon and an "s" for Sony right after the date of each pix to show comparison. The Fuji is going to Monika and I’m gonna miss it but the Nikon does everything a shade better as well as HD movies and the Sony is strictly a DSLR for photo’s only and nearing the pro level. Next to the cameras is the Sony bag for the Cam when it’s on the tripod. It’s made of an old fake leather jacket.

Retirement has brought old Gramps the opportunity to replenish his tools so a Thickness Planer is now located beside the table saw in it’s own little shed that keeps it completely dry and ready to be used at all times. It does a fabulous job on nasty old wood, making them brand new and sized to perfection.

Around the inside of the Kilnshed window there is a frame made of very old dimensional 2 by 4’s and it was just begging for the invention of fake wrought Iron spikes. They were cut on the table saw, flame sanded and sprayed many times with black wrinkle paint and then epoxyed to the frame. Wow do they look authentic! You will see the frame when it’s installed.

A note about the Photography here: Pix ~ Vent-01 Steel-03 and Nails-04 are Nikon ’Painting’ technique, on the Camera, as are others here. Much off-camera manipulation is also done on many pix, such as crop, rotate, saturation, contrast, effect, noise-reduction and add-print. Photo data is removed to reduce web-weight but available on request. Sometimes accidental cig butts, flies or roaches are digitally erased from an otherwise excellent pix.

Only the counters need refinishing in the main cabin in preparation for my Daughter Tara and Grandson Gabe’s visit in Aug.

Two years in a row a tomato plant has just broken right off at ground level and both times I just pushed it into the ground and away it went producing new roots and eventually fruit. Also a hollow stump showed up in the woodpile so naturally it had to be planted and it’s producing fruit but a bit hard to water.

With the new sign up we are expecting to get more local hits so maybe I should explain a few things about this site. It is a non-commercial Art site dedicated to inspiring and teaching Multimedia Sculpture and a variety of art forms including Photography. It was born of many local businesses in the craft and ceramic field that are all now defunct.. kaput.. nata.. All the old Hobby stores such as Ruby’s Creative Arts (our store in Westfort) and the Hobby Lobby are gone along with about 30 Ceramic business that used to thrive here in Thundering Bay. Moni’s Ceramics (linked above) is just about the last remaining ceramic business and operates more as a charity to anyone interested in the field.

In the Winter time more clay work is accomplished as seen in    The Archives   and below, but in summer the larger projects such as cars, bikes and boats are worked on. This year there needs to be a general reorganization as well as many building repairs and the projects are sporadic.

Grampa’s Notebook is the latest feature and shows Buckminster Fuller.. ish drawings of totally esoteric projects such as the stressed skin minimalist buildings we will be constructing. These are tiny portable structures such as the 6’ by 8’ storage shed shown below. As always some pictures are just to show progress on the kiln shed or other infrastructure and the fancy ones are just for art’s sake.

The picture of the Kawi project at left is using the ’Painting’ technique found on the new Nikon plus a lowered exposure compensation and a further contrast enhancement in the post production process using Pain Shop Pro. Normal Kawi pix is below using ’Auto’ and the effect is also compared in the Amy pix below. The storm pix above are interesting examples of this process.

Even the flooding mess that happened in the Spring in the Garage looks crazy.. cool with Amy ensconced on the loveseat. The Garage with it’s Maple towering above looks almost dreamlike and was left with a normal exposure. Enlarge the pix to see the striking effects and you may keep any for wallpaper.

The Medieval table is proceeding and just about ready for the final finish. It has been oiled thoroughly with linseed and shown below with it’s compliment of ceramic pipes as a display.

Our local Crane, the Blue Heron dropped by to have his picture taken, as did a Chipmunk, one of the residents that stay all winter.

Below is a hand made candle holder that is woven with stretched and textured white casting body. This operation must be done quickly. Roll the clay out on a highly textured cloth such as a towel, cut to strips and then weave. The holders are made with a textured bar of clay that is stretched thin in the middle.

More work on the Medieval table with an Old Oak inner liner doweled and glued. Amy looks happy in the trash heap, though she is only there temporarily. On the previous week a picture of the primed Kiln Shed has been added.

The Holy Grail Chalice has finally been located buried with clay pots. The inscription needs to be added and I can choose Latin; Nos sunt Spiritus, German: Wir sind der Geist, Spanish; Somos el Espíritu or Italian; Siamo lo Spirito. In Hindu from the Vedas which are Buddhist, it is expressed "Atman is Brahman" and in English "We are the Spirit".

At top Suzi-Q is our ’S’ figure in the alphabet of nudes and about the second or third made when Grampa first began to do figures. You can see that by the rudimentary nature of the piece. The pot head lady is a flower pot, not what You thought it was. She was made in clay from the lake and then cast in fiberglass. What should I call her?

Hopefully that’s the last ’Before Pix’ of the kiln shed and you can see the mess the work has created. Our sign is nearing completion but the shed must be finished before it goes up. That Blue Thing is my computer.

The forth pix in the row below shows the 15 inch board that became the pan for the ceramic bird feeder. It’s being varnished now.

Our Medieval Coffee Table project looks downright sinister since it’s just so black. It too has an ancient 15 inch board in Jackpine with lovely plane marks, along with the dimensional 2 by 4’s that are really that size and about a hundred years old too boot. It has been oiled in linseed and looks wet but will dry out and be coated with matt shellac to protect the wood and also people from slivers.

Gramps has a big grin as he bends to look into the lens of his new Nikon. Beside him is a pix of the plants that just seem to grow spontaneously, this one with a Christmas Cactus.

As Gramps has been indicating, he dropped a half a grand for a new camera, which is pretty good since it has so many nice features like an easy to use interface, quite unlike the Fuji, a CMOS image sensor and a noise reduction burst ability plus an unheard of 42x optical zoom.. very Coolpix!

You can see by the samples below that the seagull photos from the Fuji don’t measure up to the Nikon. Enlarge the Seagull in the last pix in the row and you can see the rain drops splashing up and that taken from the front landing. The pole tops are tests as is the photo of the car that you can hardly see in the ’No Zoom’ photo.

Below that are some samples of test pix and one that looks exactly like a reflection of my Dad, oddly enough.

The old Wood Car model was discovered with a nice weathered surface for arts sake. It will be a full car made in the ceder strip canoe fashion, when it gets done and who knows when that will be. Also found was a ceramic bird feeder that will be used this year and the figure of a boy that has no name as yet and for some mysterious reason isn’t nude.

The Kiln shed ceiling is a delight to behold with it’s plexiglass panels and a frosting technique was used to make the translucent ones opaque. Spray with silver ground coat, rub wrinkled tinfoil on two or three times, moving it each time to get the frost effect.

Naturally Gramps hadda take some pictures of the cats and the fly.. well that’s just a test and it failed. A wood background was chosen for the sign.

Grampa writes under the pseudonym of Namron Soar but it’s all boring Scientific stuff that no one ever reads. You can listen to him droning on about the same old thing again and again but don’t try to argue the point because it’s all Non-Theoretical, meaning there is little to actually discuss. Re-presented in this book is the comparison between Figmentalism/Idealism/Enlightenment, Plus, The Laws of Reality, Entitic Science, Nonreal Entitic Science and the new kid on the block; The Practical Laws of the Sphere.

To Read Brainworks    Click Here    for the Book Index and you can scroll down to find something that might interest you, like the topics mentioned above. Chapters Six and Eleven are even slightly funny. (No Chapters in ’Voice’ yet)

      Previous Book is all in ’Voice’    A Moderate Way