everything is made of jam

And so my slow slide into a photo/sketch/progress blog continues.

After a bit of searching, I managed to find some superb photo reference  [warning - not safe for work due to breasts] thanks to notcot.org, which helped me with a few of the finer details in the head structure.

It’s not perfect by any means.

The beads I’ve used for eyes give it a very intense stare, so I think it would be worth continuing the robot head concept, but with the new face.

This whole sculpture exercise has taken on a therapeutic aspect a little like sketching.

Which is good, considering there is not nearly enough caffeine in this house to make my brain properly spark off at the moment.

I don’t know why, but I’m having a terrible time with Bunny as a drawn comic lately. I think I realised this when I spent roughly an hour staring blankly at the IMP and coming up with nothing that didn’t seem like a tremendous cop-out.

I was going to do a comic related to the late George Carlin, but as I haven’t really gotten into his material, I felt it would be a bit dishonest and too easy. A little like making jokes about the iPhone.

So I went back to my sculpting, because I enjoy it and it’s easy to lose myself in it. That’s a worrying thing to admit in a public place, but that’s how it is.

So, here’s Otto. I lost his hat for a bit, but I’ve found it now.

I don’t know about you, but if I went from this to this

I’d be pretty freaked out too.

I have no idea how tall he is. I want to say 10 inchs but I simply can’t find a ruler anywhere.

Just placed an order for 50 of these. Should appear sometime next week.

Black is on solid matt vinyl, Red is on transparent vinyl. I’ve had the Character Set stuck to my laptop for the last month or so, and they seem to perform very well.

Any raised areas will start to wear off in time though, so I suppose it would be foolish to do what I did and stick one over the “Designed For Microsoft Windows” sticker unless you like the effect. I mean, I do, But I’m weird.

Lots of work to do on both pieces, but they’re shaping up nicely.

Warren Ellis - Bending Mars [over at Warrenellis.com]

Warren Ellis talks about colonising Mars (with a touch of Manifest Destiny which I’m sure is intended) and - as is fitting for someone who seems to live a good 20 years in the future all the time - it makes sense.

My only reservation about the whole thing is that I think it’ll be horribly botched at some critical point and the opportunity will be lost forever.

I want to believe in humans, I want to believe in the human spirit conquering impossible odds. Then I look at Burma and the mess left after Hurricane Katrina and feel like crawling under a rock. The challenge of fixing the dams and feeding the population is probably going to be easy compared to terraforming Mars.

Then again, out in Dubai, engineers are building the world’s tallest building in the form of the Burj Dubai.  Also in Dubai, there are  artificial islands to colonise and in Japan, people have build new land to carry airports.

We’ve dug giant holes under the sea, laid tracks in them and now thousands of people travel through them every week. We’re curing disease like never before. We’re working out how to build things cheaper, easier, with greater strength and resilience. These are immense challenges, and probably more in line with what will be needed for Mars.

But… would you trust a Department Of Exoterrestrial Development to do a good job of colonising Mars? Or Richard Branson’s Virgin Interplanetary?

It’s a nightmare vision, but probably speaking more about a deep distrust for government (will do anything for power) and commercial interest (will do anything for profit) on my own part than any particular problem with either option.

We’re going to need risk takers, mad men. People who see what is possible and turn it up to 11. Preferably people who don’t care so much about Profit or Market Share.

Then there’s the actual living part. It does strike me that the wonderful thing about Planet Earth is you don’t have to drop bombs or GM superbacteria before you can just survive for more than 10 seconds there.  The spread of humans from continent to continent on Earth is more or less unimpeded. It’s comparatively easy. We’ve been doing it for millenia.

Getting to Mars is not that easy and it’s taken NASA, with a fair amount of cash and probably quite a bit of of influence to land a small robot on the surface.

Then again, small wooden canoes took humans from landmass to landmass all those years ago. Is this realy any different?

Ellis talks about humans exclusively. The human interest. But who’s to say we’d would - or even should - only take humans? Surely new land is going to be useful for animals and planet life. We could be doing countless other species a favour for a change by giving them room to expand, multiply and start generating ecosystems we’ve never even seen before.

Plants that have adapted to harsh conditions on earth might thrive on Mars. Humans are capable of cultivating ecosystems and nursing them back to health on Earth, so that’s not so much of a crazy dream.

Are we really worried about primitive Martian bacteria that has survived in conditions that don’t even exist in the harshest places on earth? I suspect they’ll survive.  They’ll probably kill us like Malaria did. And does.

There is the small hurdle of Getting There and Not Dying Immediately once you do of course. But I’m sure we can work that out.

Making people care about colonising the planet at great financial cost and not selling it to the interplanetary version of Hallburton. That’s the part I’m really not so sure about.

I baked yesterday’s progress and I’ve been adding more detail/elements to it. I don’t know if they’ll hold, but it’s not looking too bad at the moment. Need to find some sort of frame for it though as the bottom is scorched from the backing tray/aluminium foil.

The eyes are a bit… skewed, but that’s mostly because of how I put the head together.