In readiness for the new laser engraver, which is now on its way, it was time to clean out the room where it will live. This room first acted as a picture framing shop when we built our new studio in 2003. We never did much framing of pictures there, and when that equipment was sold off a decade later, this became a storage room. As we all know storage room gathers everything that doesn’t have a proper home, and through the years, a lot of stuff has gathered here. We first emptied the room and sorted into good, needs to be further sorted, and the biggest category of things that needed to go away. It was a busy day of sifting through many decades of artwork, projects and all manner of bits and pieces. One of the hundreds of presentation pieces of art that was tucked onto the dusty shelves was this concept produced for a refurbished entrance to Galaxyland at West Edmonton Mall. This was one of the last large pieces of commercial art which I drew and hand coloured on paper rather than digitally. We ended up fabricating about half of the features depicted in this illustration before our time at West Edmonton Mall came to an end in late 1999. Sorting through the old storage room was a fun look back as we prepared for what will come next. Stay tuned…
Tie down frame
As we design our complex projects, we also carefully plan how we will lift, transport and reassemble them on their final site. We can’t throw straps over the features, for they would quickly wear through the paint in transit. The Downey’s Farm sign is designed to lift from the top safely. To securely fasten the load to the truck, we fabricated a temporary frame which is bolted to each end of the feature’s heavy steel bottom structure. The driver will throw a 4” strap over these frames with no chance of chafing the feature. This temporary frame will easily and quickly be removed by the customer after the feature is delivered.
Custom lights
Every day we work on one more piece (or eight) for the Copper Crown at the Hazelnut Inn. Today, Peter’s task was to weld up and sculpt the light fixtures for the bathroom. The fixtures will be disassembled tomorrow to apply the faux finishes. The electrician can then install them to finish off one more detail of many.
