EtsyMetal Book Club - The Passage by Justin Cronin

I love to read, though I've never been in a book club until we started the EtsyMetal book club. The idea was to read the book and make a piece inspired by the book. A couple books I've ready and just didn't feel inspired. And I missed a couple of books, as... they didn't sound very interesting. The most recent book sounded great and I found very inspiring.

It was The Passage by Justin Cronin.

I thought it was well written and moved along pretty quickly, especially for a complicated story line/character list.

It is really interesting as an artist to be inspired by written text - and particularly transforming it in to a 3-dimensional, metal piece. There were lots of ideas I had that could have translated well in to drawings or paintings. One in particular jumped out at me in terms of a metal piece. The teeth. This paragraph in particular really stuck with me:

For instance: Subject Zero glowed. In the infrared any heat source would do that. But the image of Subject Zero flared on the screen like a lit match, almost too bright to look at. Even his crap glowed. His hairless body, smooth and shiny as glass, looked coiled - that was the word Grey thought of, like the skin was stretched over lengths of coiled rope - and his eyes were the orange of highway cones. But the teeth were the worse. Every once in a while Grey would hear a little tinkling sound on the audio, and know it was the sound of one more tooth dropped from Zero's mouth to the cement. They rained down at the rate of half a dozen a day. These went into the incinerator, like everything else; it was one of Grey's jobs to sweep them up and it gave him the shivers to see them, long as little swords' you'd get in a fancy drink. Just the thing if, say, you wanted to unzip a rabbit and empty it out in two seconds flat.

The creatures were horrifying enough, but to imagine finding their teeth lying around everywhere, scary. I did take a bit of artistic license in creating what I would imagine their teeth to have looked like - not quite little swords... When I was playing around in the waxes - the longer pointer teeth didn't look as good, so I scaled them down and widened them out. I imagined the look of the teeth as they glinted in the light while coming out of the darkness. So I wanted them dark, but shiny, and utterly creepy. Oh... and the skull actually is not real - but amazingly realistic "movie quality" prop. I was fortunate enough to find one w/o most of it's teeth - perfect for what I wanted - making scary dentures.

It was a really fun project to work on - an art piece w/ no intention other than to create it.

I thought about making a necklace out of teeth - the way a hunter would string the teeth of their kills. I might at some point, but taking time away from making wedding rings was limited. So at some point, I might string them up to make an actual jewelry pieces. Or string each tooth individually as little pendants...

The etsymetal post will be up tomorrow on the blog, I think with the other members' pieces. Make sure to check it out - and read the book if you like post-apocalytic type stories.

EtsyMetal Book Club - Hyperion

Yet another new fun challenge from my buddies in EtsyMetal. Erin proposed a book club - and since I love reading, it sounded like a great idea to me! And to have an excuse to make a fun, non-commissioned piece sounded nice as well.

The first book we read was Lost by Gregory Maguire. It was... not so great in my opinion. I can't remember reading a book where the lead character was just so horrid. It wasn't very inspiring even though I did have a good idea for a piece. I think I resented the fact that anyone could think this was a great book and didn't want to actually make the piece. Either that, or I was just too busy and not really all THAT inspired... But I just wanted to mention it since it was technically the first one we ready. Moving on....

To the second book - Hyperion by Dan Simmons, was by far more inspiring, and well, a better read. Science fiction tends to be one of my favorite genres, so that helped. Simmons is also an excellent writer and I found very easy to read. It was a little rough at first. Many of the 'other worldly' aspects were given names, but not really described. To start with, it seemed a bit confusing, but very quickly I found myself just accepting these new words or objects and using my own imagination to create the mental landscapes. What better to create a jewelry piece than an author who encourages the reader to use their own imagination so strongly?

So I don't have time to write a full review or description of the book (you can look it up if you like) - the basic plot - there is a group of people going on a pilgrimage to see the Shrike at Hyperion - the planet that is home to the Time Tombs. The Shrike is a legendary "being". From Dan Simmons's description, my own imagination and discussion with the EtsyMetal gals - the idea for my piece was developed. The Shrike is a dangerous and vicious creature - maybe somewhat humanoid - or giant armadillo/sea urchin made out of metal. An entirely metallic being with armored plates and spikes and blades, but still organic in nature. It is mostly a character of legend, not making a direct appearance in the book. And I found it to be wonderfully inspiring - and created the Shrike Ring! Maybe a ring one of it's followers would wear... since I doubt it has anything resembling a finger or any need for a ring...

It was the first piece I have just made for fun that isn't a wedding ring in a really really long time. In fact, I can't really remember the last time I just made something. Yay!

And there are more photos on flickr as well.