World 13-1 (Platform Series)

48" x 20" Mixed Media mounted on painted board (2013)

1-1 and 1-2

New miniature sculpture/ diorama inspired by platform video games (especially Super Mario Bros.)

Shelves are approx 36" x 4", mounted on a 24" x 48" white panel.

Papier Maché, foam, wood, wire, paint, moss, rocks, pvc, and acrylic paint.

The Thinking Man

Old diorama from October 2012 that I finally got some photographs of.

Tire Swing - New Miniature Diorama

This is my newest miniature model - "Tire Swing" - photographed and lit in a variety of ways.

Materials include wire, foam, moss, polyfiber, thread, silk, modeling paste, LEDs, and a model car tire.

3D Zoetrope - progress

After seeing a wicked 3D Zoetrope when I lived in Tokyo at the Ghibli Museum, and then a youtube video of a simple, home-made model I decided to build one myself.

A 3D Zoetrope is a very bizzarre optical illusion where inanimate objects will seemingly come alive. Something about doing it with sculpture over a traditional zoetrope reel makes it a powerful, surreal experience. Rather than using slits in a reel or doing something like a flip book, the idea is to use a strobe light to isolate each "frame" of whatever animation you use, thus enabling the animation to become 3D.

Anyways, in order to build my own I've been needing to teach myself a few things about motors and gear reduction, as well as broaden my knowledge of electronics and brush up on my skills with power tools.

Today was a big milestone - my tests with 2D paper animation using a strobe and a spinning platform were successful! The next step will be to replace the flat paper with 3 dimensional objects, and I'll be ready to create a final, polished version.

I've attached a small hobby motor to a circular disk, which spins the disc pretty fast when powered with  a 3V / 700ma adapter.

I tinkered with an Arduino hooked up to a blue LED, using a simple blinking program to create a strobe that I could control and tweak.

This is the top of the disc, with my paper test animation taped to it.

...and, the successful test! It's loud, and scratchy, and doesn't look very impressive. But trust me, this is going to be awesome when I replace the paper with sculpture-

Zark's Cabinet of Curiosities

Zarkana Welcome Poster - 2012 (Ink & Photoshop)

This was done as the official poster design for Cirque du Soleil's internal welcome party for Zarkana, the newest resident show to move to Vegas. For the poster, I hand drew the paper banners, the cabinet itself, and the emblems of each of the Cirque du Soleil Las Vegas resident shows around the frame.

The contents IN the cabinet are most interesting - they are drawn from dozens of Cirque du Soleil employees across all resident shows here in Vegas. This gave me quite a creative pool to fill the cabinet from! I sent out templates of empty jars and shelves and collected the responses, which were scanned and hand-placed in Photoshop into place to make an interesting composition.

There are all sorts of goodies to find in the shelves (a candle with feet, a Spongebob vase, dogs doing handstands, Justin Beiber, etc.)

Portrait

Charcoal on newsprint