Andy Reynolds's Blog: AndyReynolds.net, page 2

Building a Robot named “Wonder”

Greetings!

I’ve got my first robot sculpture for sale in my shop!

This character is named Wonder. They’re one of the three characters I’ve been developing, and I’d say they’re the most innocent of the three.

Here’s a video showing them front and back:

I built them so they could sit on a shelf or on the edge of a desk, with legs that dangle off the edge. I built a kind of backpack that they use to keep their key strapped to their back.

They’re made of Super Sculpey Polymer Clay, chain, wire, metal nuts, foil, wood, and acrylic paint.

Here are the making-of pics:

To fix the key to the statue, I prebaked the key (so that it was hard) and then kind of “stapled” it with wire to the back of the robot. Then I built the backpack over the wires that kept the key in place. I really like how the backpack turned out.

I plan on building more sitting robots - more versions of Wonder as well as the other two that I’ve created.

Feel free to comment below or email me with any questions! My email is Andy@AndyReynolds.net. And sign up for my newsletter for updates.

Stay inspired!

—Andy

Making Another Robot Puppet

Greetings!

I’ve completed my 4th robot sculpture, which is another robot puppet! If you haven’t checked out my blogs about building robot sculptures, you can check them out here: Robot Blogs.

This robot I made to personify nostalgia. As I’m designing and making these robots, I’m starting to get a sense of who they are and what parts of myself and the world they represent. This will come to life even more as I write poems in their voice and make videos with them reciting the poems in robot voices as I did with my first puppet.

I’m really happy with this robot’s design. I used a very small clip for the mouth in order to design him much smaller than my first puppet.

Here’s a quick test video I put together for him:

Here are pics of the making-of process:

This puppet robot is made of Super Sculpey Polymer Clay, wire, nuts, and chain. Since I built him small and thin, I didn’t need to bulk him up with foil first like my other robots.

Also, I painted him black before I painted on the metallic colors. This is a tip from Ace of Clay on Youtube, who is an amazing resource of sculpting knowledge. Metalic paints show the color underneath them, just slightly, and when you use black it actually gives them a wider range of color-change as they move in the light. It also seems to make them look older and more realistic. I’m really glad I learned this from Ace of Clay, it really changes the game for me.

Here are some pics of the finished robot puppet:

I hope you found my process interesting and/or inspiring! I’m really happy with the progress I’ve been making with this new art form. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter to learn about new blog posts!

—Andy

Making my 3rd Robot

Greetings!

Let me introduce you to my third robot. I created this fellow as a gift for my girlfriend for our anniversary. If you missed my blog about my first two robot sculptures, one of which is a robot puppet, you can check it out here: I Build Robot Puppets Now…

This fellow is made of Super Sculpey polymer clay, foil, wire, nuts, an antique key, wooden skewers, and acrylic paint.

I got the idea of using wooden skewers from Ace of Clay on Youtube. I’ve been learning a lot from his sculpting videos, and definitely recommend checking him out if you’re interested in sculpting. The wooden skewers are used for the robot’s neck and arms, letting me make them very thin yet durable.

Here are some making-of pics:

After I got him all put together and baked, it was time to paint him. One of his hands cracked in the baking process, but the key covers the crack.

Here are the final pics of him:

My girlfriend was really happy with him. If I make versions of him in the future, I might buy real keyholes and nicer antique keys to incorporate into the sculpture.

Thanks for coming along to see my process!

—Andy

A Robot’s Love Poem (Puppetry Video)

Hello!

I recently made a robot puppet out of polymer clay, wire, foil, chain, nuts, and a bag clip. Check out that blog post for details and tons of pictures.

I wrote a love poem for the robot to recite, and I used a program called VoiceMod to create a robot voice that altered my voice for the poem. I’m really happy with the voice, since it doesn’t sound like me at all.

I’m definitely going to be practing my puppetry so that I get better, but I am really happy with how the video turned out. I hope you enjoy it!

—Andy

Athens, GA & Chattanooga, TN

Greetings!

Welcome to my second travel blog! My first was about stopping at The Museum of Wonder on the way to Athens, GA. I’m traveling with my girlfriend Mallory, who is an awesome keynote speaker and writer.

In case you missed my previous blogs, here’s the quick version: Mallory and I are currently staying just north of Gulfport, Mississippi. We were living in New Orleans when lightning caught our apartment building on fire, and we since we lost most of our things and no longer have rent, we decided to venture out to other cities and eventually find a new place to call home. And we’re using Mississippi as our home base as we do so.

Athens, GA

We really liked Athens — a small college city full of rolling hills, cute houses, and trees everywhere. There is nature everywhere, and there are so many walking trails through swatches of foresty parks. Tons of bands come from Athens, including R.E.M. and The B52s.

Over the course of the four days we stayed in Athens, we kept finding more reasons to like it. There are quirky shops, coffee shops, and restaurants all over the place - antique shops, comic stores, and gaming stores. While checking out a gaming shop (board games and role-playing games), we realized that they are a great resource for us while checking out a city. Most have tables set up where people play Dungeons & Dragons, other role-playing games, or board games, and joining gaming groups would be a great way to make friends in a new place. The staff in the Athens gaming shops were particularly friendly and inviting.

State Botanical Garden of Georgia

After living in New Orleans for 15 years, driving outside a city and seeing forests instead of swamps is a pretty cool experience. It’s in the midst of these forests that you find the State Botanical Garden. The New Orleans botanical garden is really nice, but the one in Athens is another world - it’s huge, reminding me more of a nature park than a botanical garden. There were butterflies everywhere, giant playgrounds for kids, and plants from all over the world — all in the middle of a forest.

The first thing we saw were hundreds of flowers covered in these yellow and black butterflies.

And here are some pics from the rest of the Botanical Garden, including the really cool playground and some groovy snail statues!

Church - An Amazing Dive Bar

One of the last places we checked out in Athens was a downtown bar called Church. We didn’t find it while researching Athens, it was just a place we saw while wandering around downtown. It was late afternoon, we were the only patrons, and the bartender was really nice and talked to us for a while about Athens and the bar itself.

Church feels like a mix of a few different bars in New Orleans, especially bars on Lower Decatur in the French Quarter. It’s a gay bar, a dive, and full of religious paintings that have irreverent things written on them in bubbly letters (which reminded us of the New Orleans artist Dr. Bob’s work). There is also a crazy amount of Pee-wee Herman dolls all over. The artist and owner is named Sister Louisa, and the Church in Athens is actually the second location, the first one being in Atlanta.

Here are some pictures of the bar. (If you’re religious, you may wish to skip this part. The artwork is pretty irreverent)

Chattanooga, TN

So after Athens, we went to Greenville, South Carolina. We really didn’t like Greenville much, so I actually don’t have any pictures. It just wasn’t our kind of city.

Then we visited Chattanooga, Tennesee. Unfortunately, by the time we got to Chattanooga, we were very tired of traveling. We started traveling only weeks after the apartment fire, and we really yearned to just chill out and not have to run around cities for a while.

Even with being exhausted, we did enjoy Chattanooga. Driving in, there was a river full of people white water rafting for miles and miles. The city is like Athens in that it is full of walking trails and nature. We drove all around the city, checking out gaming shops, restaurants, and breweries.

We stayed in a neighborhood called Saint Elmo at the bottom of a mountain called Lookout Mountain, which has a whole neighborhood on top of it. We took an incline railway that pulled us up to the top, where we walked around and looked out over the city. It was so beautiful! Since we were so tired, I didn’t get many pictures of the city, but here are some pictures of the view from Lookout Mountain as well as a video of the ride up:

Thanks for checking out my blog, and I hope you’re having an inspired day!

—Andy

I build Robot Puppets now…

Hello!

So it turns out I build robots now — specifically robot puppets.

It started as an idea to build one robot out of junk to do strange travel videos of the places we’re visiting, but turned into a much larger project.

I started collecting junk and relics from antique stores thinking I would build a single robot, and then I got very inspired by people who build robots on Pintrest and Instagram. I didn’t want to buy soldering equipment or metal drills, as I don’t really have a workshop right now, and I happened upon polymer clay. It’s a synthetic clay that you can bake in an oven or toaster oven. I’d heard about polymer clay but didn’t know much about it.

I took ceramics in high school and college and loved making art with my hands, both sculpting and throwing. Working with clay again has been so good for my mind — I’ve been looking for a meditative creative outlet for a while now and finally stumbled upon it.

Robot #1 - The Proof of Concept

Here is my first proof of concept — I built this to see if I could build a simple robot. I built this guy out of polymer clay, wire, and an old caster wheel. I made him pretty simple, not wanting to put too much time into him in case he just broke when I baked him. He turned out awesome, and I painted him with metallic acrylic paint. The wheel works so you can roll him around.

Robot #2 - The First Robot Puppet

After the success of the first robot, I set out to design a puppet. Originally, to have the robot “talk” I was thinking of a light bulb that I could turn on and off while he “spoke.” But now that I was baking the robot, I didn’t want to use a light bulb.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always taken anything I could make “talk” and made it say silly things, so almost immediately I thought of bag clips — the clips you use to keep food fresh after the bag is open. I bought a package of nice ones that looked like they would last a while.

I used foil for the inside of the body and head (standard for polymer clay sculpting, which I learned by watching Youtube videos) and used wire to attach the foil to the top and bottom of the bag clip.

I knew I wanted the body to move, to not just be a solid piece below the puppet mouth, so I decided to use chain as the neck, arms, and legs. This way the robot would move around while I made him speak, so he’d seem a little more alive.

I built the puppet with Sculpey polymer clay, specifically called Sculpy III. Here are pictures of the building process:

After getting the basic body down, with some detail on the robot’s head, I set out detailing the head, torso, and hips. For the hands and feet, I wanted to design them so that they didn’t need to be facing a certain way, so that if they swung around they wouldn’t seem backwards.

After I baked the pieces, I got out my metalic acrylic paints and painted him.

A video of my robot puppet!

The Next Steps

I’m super happy with this guy. Here are the next steps with my robot sculptures:

1 - Write robot poetry and make surreal robot videos with the puppet.

2 - Build more robots! I love making them, and I want to make smaller ones that I can eventually have for sale. I also eventually want to make a story involving 4 robots and scatter pieces of their story all over the internet. Something involving time travel, the apocalypse, and love.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments or in an email - Andy@AndyReynolds.net

Stay inspired!

—Andy

The Museum of Wonder, Alabama

**Artist & Currator - Butch Anthony - Museum of Wonder

Greetings!

Welcome to the first blog in my Travel Blog series! In my previous post, I wrote about lightning catching my and my girlfriend’s apartment building on fire in New Orleans, and how we decided that since we don’t have any stuff or rent, we’d venture out to other cities and eventually find a new place to call home.

Our first stop was Athens, GA, where I’m writing this post right now. On our way here, we stopped at the Museum of Wonder in Seale, Alabama, and it was quite wondrous indeed!

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It’s a small drive-thru museum/art exhibit made mostly of shipping containers with glass walls so that you can see inside them when you drive slowly past. The containers are full of old bones, sculptures, paintings, artifacts, and taxidermy. The outside of the shipping containers are covered in murals.

The whole museum is created & curated by the artist Butch Anthony.

Butch Anthony - The Artist & Curator

According to the Museum’s website:

At the age of fourteen, Butch built a one-room log cabin that became a workshop for his many creations and eventually the first incarnation of the Museum of Wonder. As his skills developed, Butch began to build and fashion furniture, sculptures, and many other works of art and constructions. The Museum soon became too small and too popular for the log cabin to contain.

In 2014, Butch built The World’s First Drive-Thru Museum out of shipping containers. It sits off U.S. HWY 431 in Seale, Alabama and exhibits a rotating display of Butch’s handcrafted designs and curiosities for the wonderment of visitors and passerbys alike.

Below are photos of the artwork & artifacts in the shipping containers.

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Past the shipping containers are more sculptures and artwork, a tree with shoes hanging from the branches, giant red balls with saying written all over them, and old marquis signs with sayings on them as well:

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The Museum offers a peek into the magical, the strange, and otherworldly, while also feeling oddly close to the everyday world we inhabit. It definitely lives up to its name and instills a sense of wonder in those who visit.

Enjoy these photos and be sure to check out the Museum if you’re wandering through Alabama!

—Andy

New Website & Creative Projects

Greetings!

In a previous post, I wrote about how lightning struck our apartment building in New Orleans, and that my girlfriend and I decided to turn a bad situation into an adventure. We relocated near the Mississippi coast and will be traveling to various cities around the United States looking for a future place to call home.

If you want to be updated about my travel blogs and creative endeavors, sign up for my Newsletter.

New Website

Since I’m not working for a bit, I’ve had time to finish the new website I was building. A few months ago I started taking my girlfriend Mallory’s Marketing Accelerator course, which was created specifically for small creative businesses like mine. I’ve been using what I learned to create this website from scratch and start up an email Newsletter. I’m very happy with how my website turned out!

Creative Projects

The Nora Novel

I’ve also had time to work on my creative projects, mostly my newest novel idea about a woman searching a strange, dream-like world for her lost lover. The main character is named Nora, and I haven’t come up with a title yet, so I call it the Nora Novel.

For about six months, I poured through the instructional Youtube videos of an author named Abbie Emmons. I was going through her videos on the 3 act plot structure, and I learned so much from her detailed ideas on how each piece of the plot works together, and so much more. I had an idea for my current novel, and as I watched the videos I broke the plot over and over until I had an extremely fleshed-out outline where every piece works with every other piece.

If you’re a fiction writer, I highly recommend Abbie Emmons’ videos.

With the fire and all the moving, I haven’t spent as much time writing as I normally would, but I’ve finished a draft of the intro chapter and chapter one, and I’ve outlined the second chapter and written most of the dialogue for it.

With this novel, I’m trying to weave my poetry into all of the descriptions while still having very real and relatable characters. So far I’m very happy with what I’ve written. If you want to check it out, I do have the intro available for people who support me on Patreon.

Other Creative Projects

I’m currently gathering pieces of junk that I’m going to sculpt into a character, then I’m going to create Youtube videos with this character. I’m going to create a story, voice them, and possibly even make music for the videos. There’s a lot more to it, but it’s very hush-hush. You understand.

I also plan on spending some time every day learning the theremin. A theremin is an otherworldly electronic instrument from the early 1900s that’s been used in Sci-Fi movies and shows. My theremin is one of the few things I didn’t lose in the fire, and I’m looking forward to practicing and really learning how to do some cool stuff with it.

That’s all for now! I hope you’re having an awesome September!

—Andy

Lightning, Fire & Adventure

Greetings!

I’m currently writing from the gorgeous city of Athens, GA! There are so many updates to share — my life has completely changed this year, but especially over the last month.

Lightning & Fire

As you may know, I’ve lived in New Orleans for almost exactly 15 years. I’m from California originally and moved from there to Seattle for a couple of years, then to New Orleans, which I’ve loved. My girlfriend and I had been living in the neighborhood of Mid City, which is beautiful—full of oak trees, pretty shotgun houses, a bayou, and the gorgeous City Park.

One month ago today our apartment building was hit by lightning and caught fire during an afternoon rainstorm. We got ourselves and our animals out, watching for 3 hours as exactly 10 firetrucks showed up, squads of Firemen taking turns going into the 4 apartments to put the fire out.

Firemen resting as other Firemen go into the apartments. You can see the wall in the back of the house falling away from the fire inside the crawlspace.

We lived in a 4-plex house, with two apartments on the first floor and two above on the second. The theory is that lightning hit a metal pipe near the roof and traveled into the house, starting a fire in the crawlspace between the top apartments and the bottom apartments, and then spread into the walls of the upper apartments. We were on the first floor, and none of our stuff actually burned. The firemen going into our apartment tore down the ceiling in our bedroom and kitchen so they could spray the fire from below as other firemen were spraying the floor from the upstairs apartments. So a lot of our stuff was destroyed by tons of water, pieces of the ceiling falling onto everything, and ash from the burned wood.

Photo of our bedroom, taken by Mallory Whitfield.

As we watched from the sidewalk, my girlfriend said something like, “Maybe we adventure for a while, explore other cities and find another place to live.”

So we turned a bad situation into an adventure.

Exploring Other Cities

We love New Orleans but had been getting the urge to explore and find magic in other places. So the next day we salvaged what we could of our things, got all of it into storage, and I quit my barista job at this really cool zombie-themed coffee shop called Sacred Grinds (which is surrounded by above-ground cemeteries).

We took our pets to Gulf Port, Mississippi, where we have family watching them as we set out to explore other cities.

Keep checking back for my Travel Blogs about our trips over the next several months, or sign up for my Newsletter to know when I post new Travel Blogs.

The First Cities We’re Checking Out

We’re currently in Athens, Georgia. It’s gorgeous here—full of trees and walking trails and a river snaking through the whole city. Downtown has awesome, old architecture and is quirky and has tons of interesting restaurants and shops.

Tomorrow (Friday) we’re heading to Greenville, South Carolina. I’m super excited to check out Greenville. There’s a waterfall in the center of the downtown area, and it also looks like it will be gorgeous and full of trees and nature. We’ll only be there for 2 days, but I’m very excited about that city.

We’re talking about tagging on a couple of days in Chattanooga before heading back to Mississippi, just to get a feel of a third city to start thinking about.

I’ll be posting pictures of all of these places on my Travel Blog, so check that out, and subscribe to my Newsletter to know when I post new blogs and release new books.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re having a good September!

—Andy

Book Signing in New Orleans!

I have a Book Signing today (11/19) at Frenchmen Art & Books in New Orleans! I’m super excited to be working with this shop! David, the owner, has been such a nice and helpful person, giving me really good marketing ideas that have helped me out immensely over the last few months. The signing is … Continue reading Book Signing in New Orleans! →