This week was the last week before break so it has been full of mostly gift making. I aimed to working on my zoetrope this week and finishing the gifts quickly but the gifts ended up taking the whole week to complete and I've been feeling some burn out on the zoetrope project. I had around 5-6 gifts to finish by the end of this week. The first gifts were wooden ornaments that I made for a friend whos birthday had recently passed and the other was a gift for my history teacher. They featured a character from a popular tv show and a picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, I don't have a picture of either ornament.
My next task was making some things for a secret santa I was participating in with my friends. I decided to theme all my gifts around the popular manga and anime series Jujutsu Kaisen. The first was a 2 piece puzzle which featured the fan favorite character Satoru Gojo split in half.
I also made a cut out of another character from a popular internet engraved on a smaller piece of acrylic which I unfortunately do not have a picture of. The next thing I made was also themed around the same show. It was a long piece of acrylic with several of my friends most favorite characters arranged in a line with a piece of acrylic sticking out behind it so it could stand up. I made two of them for two separate people.
The last thing I attempted to make was the most arduous process and I also put the most work into. It was a spray painted acrylic engraved image on a stand which I had to go through 3 iterations for to get it right. The desk decoration featured the main character from a pilot episode of an animated show on youtube and it is spray painted half red and half blue to mimic the colors of the characters clothing. The first two versions I made however, were black because I didn't know we had blue spray paint. I considered those two fails because the first one had too much spray paint so it got scratched and the second one had too little spray paint so you could see through the paint.
The final version would be spray painted red and blue however I faced the problem of figuring out how to attach the stands that hold up the image. My first plan was to use hot glue but then I was advised to try out using acrylic weld which was highly toxic and difficult to use but very effective. So I spent most of my day yesterday along with my fellow classmate Scott Campbell trying to attach on the stands using the weld. Apparently it takes a while to dry however because I came in today to take a look at the stands to see the progress of the drying and it was not welded and it snapped fairly easily. So last minute I cut out new stands with quarter inch acrylic and hot glued them on because the hot glue is not visible from the front and it holds well.
Didn't have time to work on the zoetrope but I got a few new ideas that I am looking forward to testing and building next year. Until then this is my last blog post of 2023.
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