Ok, this is my first entry on my blog. I don't usually do things like this but I have learned so much and made so many mistakes while starting on my new project that I thought I should record it somewhere. This blog is as much for myself as it is for anyone else who might be interested in it. So I am just going to write whatever I'm thinking at the time as a kind of diary more than anything else.

So now I will explain what's going on. I have been interested in automata for quite awhile. There is a fascinating museum in San Francisco called The Musee Mechanique. it is not exactly a museum so much as a collection of coin operated mechanical toys mostly from the turn of the century (20th century that is). As soon as I saw them I was truly intrigued with these devices and was immediately inspired to create my own. I new I couldn't do anything as sophisticated as they had there, so I decided to start with hand operated creations.

I began doing some internet investigation and quickly found that category of the creations I was interested in were called automata. They range from sophisticated feats of mechanical engineering such as I had seen to relatively simple hand-carved wooden toys. The best sites I've found for the handmade kind are Cabaret Mechanical Theatre http://www.cabaret.co.uk/ for wooden ones and robives http://www.robives.com/ for ones made out of paper.

To continue: I made one mechanically simple automata ( I suppose it qualifies because it does move a little) out of wood, clay and various found materials. Which I will show here:

But I knew I would have to do some studying in physics if I ever wanted to make something close to what I imagined. I found some books and websites with information on the different kinds of mechanical movements you can use. Most of the information I could find was regarding "paper engineering" such as pop books and greeting cards where you pull the tab and they move. So I made some of those.

This time I wanted to combine the elements of a card with that of a painting. The first one I did was a kind of a joke one of a man stabbing a woman (not too graphically). I made it out of foam board and cardboard and painted it with acrylic paint. I actually sold it for $20! That leads me to the project I am currently working on.