Japan

New year's eve and already in Japan for 1,5 week. So maybe it is about time to tell something about my time here. As most of you will remember this years snowfall and how the airports handled it (or didn't), well I was one of those lucky people to have a flight at that time. From Edinburgh to Narita (Tokyo) through Amsterdam (which was impossible). Instead of going back home and try to rebook something online I stood in line for six hours to gt rebooked. Because of this I was able to get a flight to Dusseldorf so that my parents could pick me up there. This way I could at least spend the weekend with my family and then drive from there to Schiphol (Amsterdam), to fly to Narita.
When I finally got onto the plane to Japan I couldn't believe it. After being nervous for about 3 days I got to spend my Birthday in Tokyo with my girlfriend (Manami). We stayed at a hotel in Asakusa and the first touristic thing we did was going to a Japanese shrine. After 2 nights we went to her parents house which is a bit more outside of Tokyo, here I got some nice country side views and some time to get adjusted to the new timezone.
I have to say I didn't really did that much research into Japan since my main reason of going was to spent the holidays with Manami, so when she asked me several times where I wanted to go I didn't know so well. Luckily from their hometown we could see Fuji mountain and since we don't really have those in the Netherlands I thought it would be nice to go get a little closer look. We decided to go to Hakone where we had a super luxurious traditional Japanese hotel. The hotel had a beautiful garden and several hot spring baths.
We went out to lake Ashinoko to get some nice views of Fuji mountain and off course some pictures.
On the way back we stopped to see a Japanese castle in Odawara, I had no idea we would stumble upon this which made the whole trip even better.

One of the other benefits of being here is that I finally get a closer look to the Japanese car culture. Since I am doing some research about the car industry and globalization and such it is nice to actually see some of the Japanese traffic and infrastructure so I can understand a bit better why their car's are they way they are (and I don't mean the ones made for the European market).

So this will be it for this year, I wish you all the best for the next.

Sander

Snow, snow and guess what....... More snow

So I know I should have made a new post way earlier, but to be honest there hasn't been going on to much because of massive snowfall. So unless you would have loved to hear about my research for my presentation (which I am giving tomorrow) there wasn't that much to talk about. The school was practically closed for the first week of December which  gave me time to work at home (on my presentation that is). We are doing a Pecha Kucha which means you will get to pick 20 slides/pictures and have 20 seconds to talk before it switches to the next one. This will give you about 6min and 40 seconds for your complete presentation. And since I am so experienced in presentations (not), this is making me quite nervous. None of us really know what is to be expected of us. And the fact that because of the snow it has been a while since I could meet up with a teacher to talk about it, doesn't make it any easier either. So to get my head of of that for a bit I am just going to show you what my new neighborhood has been looking like for the past weeks.

November

It's already December and here I am making my last official post for November (time goes fast). I havn't been at college to much lately and this because of 2 reasons. The first one being that 2 of my friends came over from the Netherlands to visit me. And the second one, well maybe you might have even seen something about it on the news...... Scotland is covered by snow!!! Never in my life have I expierienced snow like this. It started on saturday and it's still going on right now (I even had to give my friends the car I had to go back to the Netherlands because the airport was closed). So instead of talking about work I will just show you some pictures of the city instead.
Enjoy!

Bronze Casting

Not that I haven't been doing anything lately, more because I have been quite busy and not wanting to post about every fart I let. I decided to try and go to a weekly update. The past few weeks I have been working on a bronze sculpture. For this I used an scaled up (slightly larger than the original) Jaguar sign and made a rubber mold out of it. This means that I can duplicate it with a wax model which I can then use to make into another mold to cast it in bronze (or hopefully later in this course into glass).
Even though the emblem looks very neat and simple, making a mold out of it took a bit more than I expected. First of all the arms are undercuts, but because the rubber is so flexible I was able to get away with it. Another point I really want to mention is that a lot of people think that bronze casting is expensive because of the material. Well I can assure you the bronze is actually one of the cheaper parts of the process. Once you have your wax model you have to get rid of the mold lines and ad a pour cup (this is where you will pour in the bronze later on), as well as the feeding lines and the air vents.problem with these is that once you have it in bronze all of these will have become bronze as well and you need to remove them trying not to mess up your sculpture.
So you can guess this is a very time consuming process (which is why I have been working on this one for over a week now). After you cleared the whole thing up and sand blasted it, you can color it bu using patina (different chemicals which will give off different reactions and thus colors). This is where I am now and I feel really satisfied with my result.
All that I have to do now is coming up with a nice foot for the piece and send it of to my dad. None of which I will do right away since I have a lot of other stuff to as well. I will keep you all up to date with my projects and if you have any questions/remarks feel free to comment on my blog page.

Enjoy the pictures.

Map

There aren't a lot of assignments  that I have to do, but one of them consists of me making a "mind" map including research of at least 2 materials I am interested in. Since I have been living in a few different countries now I decided to take the map thing a bit literally as well. For the research I used some of the books about glass I have gathered over the last couple of years, and since I am getting most of my inspiration out of making collages that is what I set out to do. Since the project feels like an ongoing thing and I don't feel that I am even close near the end of researching (I don't even feel I have really started yet), I didn't want to make it look to finished. I made sure I have lots of "growing" space around it and since there is no-one in the studio space next to me I might even move the wall out a bit to make even more room. Anyway if you are still with me (or not at all), it might be best to just show you a picture of what I did so far:

Collage

Since someone decided to set off the fire alarm I might as well post another thing while waiting to get back in to the building (am I glad I took my laptop before I went outside).
It's been a good couple of weeks now since I have been here and because I started a month late I decided to participate in a little class project (just to show that I was willing to actually do some work). The assignment was to think about a poster you used to have in your bedroom while you were a child/teenager. Being the nerd I am I came up with one of the Star Wars posters I have. I have always liked to draw stuff from Star Wars but I was never satisfied with the results I got. So this time I thought I let that all just go and make a collage no matter what the outcome would be. To my surprise it was actually quite satisfying (which is one of the reasons I am sharing it with you right now). So here is the result I hope you enjoy.

Sander

Welcome to Scotland

Hello Everyone,


Today I finally made my new blog. After thinking about it for a while, I got a message from my cousin (who is currently traveling around the world doing martial art) and saw his blog. That really made me want to do one again. So here it goes.

I arrived in Edinburgh on the 19th of October and it was a beautiful day. The first challenge was to find a room to live in, which looked very difficult in the beginning but it worked out pretty well. I live in the beautiful Morningside neighborhood now and it is about half an hours walk from ECA (Edinburgh College of Art). I have a very nice studio at the school (which is actually bigger then the room I sleep in).

I made a little mailing list and added people who I thought might be interested in my blog. So if you're not just let me know and I can remove you from it (or you can just keep deleting the e-mails and pretend you do care).