Weldy-Weldy Cart

It has been pretty cold outside these past few weeks, but I wanted to complete a project that I've had on the back-burner for quite some time now. So I bundled up and headed out to the garage. I was eager to brave the cold because the project involved welding. If this is something that interests you, but you've never had the opportunity to weld, I strongly suggest that you search out some way to give it a try. It's a lot of fun and can yield great results. Find someone to show you the ropes... how to get set-up and give you a rundown on technique. Then it's all about practice, the more you weld the better you will become. 


This project was to build a cart for my welder. Since I didn't have the a bottle of shielding gas, I build the cart using flux-cored wire arc welding. The welds aren't as nice as MIG welds, but it still works quite well to fuse metal to metal. Below are some pictures taken throughout the process.

I began by cutting all of the metal stock that I required to build the cart. Since I don't own a chop saw, I rented one from the local hardware store. I wanted to make all of the necessary cuts during the rental time limit. After cutting metal pieces with the chop saw, there remained burs that required grinding.

FROG-O: complete!

I promised to show the results of my idea for a kid's glue stick, so here it goes! Below are my final submission boards.

Enjoy and don't forget to vote for this design here!

Henkel Adhesive Packagind Design Contest

Here is an idea I am planning to submit to the adhesive packaging contest by Henkel. Among the different groups of adhesives this company wants to see some designs dedicated to children. So I cam up with FROG-O gluestick.

The design of this packaging was inspired by the frog - green and slimy it hops from place to place and it is a character in many children's tales.

For now, I worked out the views of this product in illustrator and I am going to import them into Solidworks to make a more detailed 3D model. Stay tuned!

FROG-O glue stick packaging for Henkel glue competition

Gradients

Every so often I open up Illustrator and just mess around. The tools that it offers to create and edit graphics are seemingly endless, and sometimes I find it helpful to re-discover its capabilities.

I was inspired by the cover graphic I saw in the latest issue of Kootany Mountain Culture Magazine. It was a pretty simple image really; a series of gradient strips all smashed together. The effect was pretty interesting and I decided to give it a try. I started by choosing a swatch selection from Kuler and then began messing around with the gradient tool in Illustrator. Here's the result:

When I completed the gradient image I started to play around with the transparency and blending mode tools and began to layer some cool textures. These are two of my favourites:

This is really just scratching the surface in terms of what Illustrator can do, but even with only using a few tools you can get some really interesting graphics.

1972 GMC 1500

I find vehicles to be very intriguing. Automotive design can yield some pretty interesting vehicles. Certain sleek automobiles take hold of your attention as you gaze at them driving by. While others leave you feeling perplexed that they rolled off the assembly line.

Either way, they are an interesting subject matter and sometime you just gotta draw one! Observing and drawing vehicles provides a great opportunity to practice your illustration skills. Perspective, shapes, light and shade, line wight, color... you get to work it all.

In this case, that car I drew was a 1972 GMC 1500, and it's not even a car at all. It's a pick-up truck!

Sribbles

Something interesting I found through Stumbleupon: an online sketching application that traces your drawings in a unique way. Check it out here if you want to give it a try too. Warning: it is addictive. Here are a couple of sketches I made with it.

A 5 minute doodle of a cool guy in Scribbler

A more refined sketch of a girl