We’re adding a touchscreen to a museum in Foresthill. We could have just bolted it to a wall but what’s the fun in that?
It seemed like building an 8’ tall fake tree trunk wouldn’t be too hard, at least if the videos on YouTube were to be believed. But before we got too deep into it we wanted to try our hand at building a stump out of a bucket, some cardboard and expanding foam.
We made a cardboard base and glued the bucket to it then added some cardboard buttressing to give it a more non-bucket shape. We applied the foam in a can in vertical stripes and let it dry overnight. The we carved it up with a razor knife and knocked down the hard lines with a rasp. After that we applied a mixture of “monster mud” that was about 3 to 1 joint compound and paint. This filled in a lot of the gaps and holes in the foam.
Then we threw on several different hard coatings just to check what would be best. Of course the All Purpose Foam Coat worked best seeing as it was way more expensive than the mortars or cements we tried.
After this it was on to painting. We worked out our color scheme on the small model before taking on the big one.
Once we worked this out to a reasonable look we started building the full size.
It was a little trickier because it needed to support a 27” touchscreen that had to detach for transport.
Because we couldn’t screw the tv to the mount while it was in place, we had to make the mount slide in and out. Total nightmare. We usually specialize in making things look like they work instead of actually working because that’s way harder.
Once it was sorted, we built it up the same way we had done on the model.
After we finished up we weren’t sure what to do with the stump we made so we converted it into a future primitive game console.
We put it on a lawn and it looked so good that now we need to figure out what kind of game it could control in the wild. Stay tuned.
New Art Hero 