My Steampunk Piece – The Inside, Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 and my final post of the creation of my Steampunk piece for the science fiction gallery at the Philadelphia Show. These photos follow along with the creation of the inside of the piece which I called “Steam, Inc – Lab Division”.

Here you see an aluminum tube and some ‘thingys’ I found at the hardware store.  I know there’s a proper  name for these but thingys is what I have on the tip of my tongue at the moment. 

I painted them with a copper metallic paint to go along with the background paper and the colors I had chosen for the outside.

Here I am checking the placement of some of the smaller pipes along with the copper painted tubes.

In the photo below I hope you can see the patina that I added to give the pipes an aged appearance.  I love this process but then I like transformations of all kinds when it comes to these projects.

The smaller pipes are made from these white plastic rods.  They were straight to begin with and I bent them in various ways to my liking.

Then I painted them with a base coat of black to prep them for the paint I wanted to use.

Another test run of the placement of the pipes before they were painted.  I didn’t want to paint pipes that weren’t going to work and I wanted to make certain that I had created all the pipes I thought I would need.

Assembly and base coat of the clock face and ornamentation.

After several layers of paint – clock detail.

Here you see the clock face with most of the gears in place.  Just a few more bits to add and the right side will be complete.

Assembling these small bits was fun but sometimes the little things take as long to create as the larger details.  The glue is setting up on this one.

Turning small bottles into light bulbs?

Part of a very small hat.

This close-up shows the bottle above in place as well as some of the other elements.

Another close-up – each piece was assembled from various items I had been collecting.  All except the books which I made specifically for this project – titles by Jules Verne.

Finally, the left side complete with quotes on the edges from Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Sir Isaac Newton and Leonardo Da Vinci.

and the right side also with quotes.

The Occupant of the Lab.  I love this little guy.  He is 5 inches tall.  Making his vest and top hat were a huge challenge but I enjoyed it.  The wings were a first for me.  I created them from a very thin cardboard and wired them so they could be shaped and bent, and painted them to match the other parts of the piece.

Here’s the entire box. 

And another look at the front once more.

This is what has been keeping me busy day and night.  I miss it already.  I guess that means it’s time to start another project.  Among the things on my list is the gallery piece for TBAI in August.  The gears in my brain are already churning but I have to do a little housekeeping first.  And maybe make a little bear or two.

As always, thanks for reading!