Jason Eaton

Wonderfest is in a week! Still busy updating the France trip pics, finishing up a Hero TIE Fighter (ANH flavor), thrilling to Gordon’s mellower personality, finding interesting things in bell peppers, and still AMAZED that we hung out with Boris Williams…

Be sure to click “France” in the top menu to see our trip pics! Moe content added daily-ish! Lots of pics to slog through. Currently enjoying some painful red itch eye, which apparently is allergy related, and not in fact conjunctivitis. Huh.

A movie with Sebastian the cat, who loved jumping for his stick, circa 1999.

In 1999, I found the rarest POTF2 figure and opened it. The internet was outraged that day, lol.

In 2003, I had an Indiana Jones 16 foot kangaroo whip. I loved cracking it.

This is a collection of photos showing things I made from the pre-digital era, from the late 1970s to about 1999.

In 2008, I created a master pattern for the Lunadiver Stingray, which you can see here. The instruction guide is in pdf form, and chronicles the first build which I gave to Lincoln Wright to paint for Wonderfestival 2009. His paint work was wonderful and defined the way many would paint the Lunadiver models going forward. Download the guide here. Here are photographs of the models I made from my castings.

This is a build up from a resin kit of the Probe Droid, as seen in The Empire Strikes Back. I added a light, sound, and servo kit from Hyperdyne Labs so it can rotate it’s head, extend and retract antennas, fire the laser (via red led), and play sounds from the film. It’s a great model involves a nice amount of scratch building and tube cutting, and builds into a studio replica with all five legs articulated! This was a great opportunity to use the laser cutter to design and cut an internal armature as well. Here’s a video of the model in action!

I’ve redone the back room, at long last – not a lot left to do – you get the idea!

I want to post about my first real job. The one that took me in as a thirteen year old (hello work permit!) and spit me out as a young adult, at twenty three. It was a job that I cherish to this day, and will always thing of with incredible fondness and pride. No job will ever be Art Things again, as it should be, but I wish I had “cherished” it more when I was there. I started working there in the late Summer of 1987, just before my first year of High School. My family lived on Melvin Avenue in Annapolis MD, and Art Things was a beautiful idyllic 10 minute walk up the street, through the neighborhood and then business district of West Annapolis. Art Things at that time employed around seven women, who acted as additional mothers to me at first. The personnel varied only slightly, and the core group are still there to this day, which is incredibly comforting in a world that always changes around you. Art Things has changed over the years as well, and it’s changes since I left in 1998 are strange to my eyes, as the switch from spiral staircase to “regular” stairs was probably strange for others when the construction happened during my tenure there.

These women helped “train” me to be a good human and man, and we were all encouraged to use and know all of the art supplies that the store sold – it was and is a dizzying array of supplies, and the things I learned there over the years have served me VERY well in my art, hobbies, home repair, and life. They taught me to “always leave a toilet seat down when you leave a bathroom”, and that “adding acrylics over oils will cause a horrible mess that will never dry or cure” – stuff EVERYONE should know. The clientele  were also amazing. We had regulars we both loved and hated to see walk through those doors, and some still shop there – I love to hear about them! I could go on and on and on about these wonderful people and experiences, but I’ll let some pics speak for themselves. A large component of our work days were distilled into doodles and notes – little missives we sent back and forth to each other, and I apparently saved and was given many of them!

Today we went to Zeke’s Coffee down the street and tried Kopi Luwak, which is the coffee made from those beans collected from Civet poop. Yep – Cat Shit Coffee™!