General Art discussions...

I'm deciding to rebuild the Creation department, but I'm also deciding if I felt like paying a small fee to host a forum from scratch so I had complete artistic license of every page. So, I'm less worried about organization as this lack of creative control at forumotion upsets me a little more every day. ANYWAY, I added this 'General Art' forum in preparation for redefining things around here, because in the long run, nobody really cares if it's animated, 3D, 2D, traditional, or lit up like a whorish Christmas tree. Also, I felt like an idiot bringing up other peoples' art in "our" creation department, and this general art will work just for discussing and sharing and stuff.

I raise this thread from the dead!

So I had this idea 2 or 3 years ago. Yes, YEARS! Finally got around to giving it a shot. We've all seen the handbags and such created by weaving plastic grocery bags together and hitting them with an iron, yes? Yay, what fun! BAGS! Yes, it's still creative, and cheap, which is an added bonus.

My idea... if an iron can fuse the bags together into a sheet, what would happen if you twisted bags together while applying heat from 3 dimensions with a heat gun? Would the sheets of plastic, now pressed together, start to melt together, becoming both brittle and flexible? Could one make a soft stick of plastic this way? Could that stick of plastic be further bulked up with more grocery bags, wrapped and applied and knotted and melted in different ways? Could this be used to make a REALLY cheap, solid, yet flexible armature?


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YES...it can. Plastic is now my bitch. Okay, looking at the pic on a screen instead of a phone, I realize the pic is shite. The shoddy ass attempt at shaping a basic miniature human arm took about 10 minutes. I started with 2 bags in a vise, twisting them slowly as I ran the heat gun along the length. It was plainly visible that the layers were sticking together. When the two bags were in a stick, it was flexible... though it was more about bending than curving, which I'm sure could be adjusted with more heat. Thing is, 2 bags melted together was able to stay straight from the vise. The lumps (muscle groups?) were made by tying individual bags around the stick, then pulling them around the stick as heat was applied, then kindof crimping the ends so they would melt to the mass. WARNING!!!! WEAR FUCKING GLOVES!!! Melting plastic is HOT!!!! And do it outside, that smell is nasty!!!!

But what you see in the picture is 10 minutes, 5 bags. 2 bags for the stick, 2 for the larger lump, one for the smaller lump. Now, what can we make with this knowledge?!

I looked at the picture before I read the post, so keep that in mind when I answer your closing question.

What do I see? A way in which we can give models the appearance of launching rockets. The skinny section on the right would be the contrail, the puffy stuff on the left would be the initial cloud that is formed when the rocket is launched.