Laurent Davidson - Mobile Lesson

hello I'm here today to show you how to make a mobile there are two types of mobiles and they are behind me we have the original mobile that is closer to the Calder model with that is made with rods and aluminum sheet and this one being a little harder to start working with we'll turn our attentions more to this kind of mobile which is without any rods but and only links this one is made out of aluminum as well but today we'll be working with much easier materials we'll be working with cardboard but you can also use plastic you can use wood you can use plywood you can use aluminum you can use anything you can think of including paper if you figure out how to reinforce it um the um the first things we're going to work with is a balancing tool and this one is very very rudimentary and we'll start making one right now um you take a piece of cardboard like this which is about an eighth of an inch thick and you're going to let it fold in its natural Groove in other words lengthwise of the undulations there so uh we're going to cut a Little Triangle because we don't want to have it too cumbersome and we're this is where you were probably wondering why you wanted two thumbtacks in this project this is where we're going to use them and if you don't have any thumb attacks go into your kitchen drawers is always thumbtacks they're sort of lying about waiting okay so here we have one and we have two here you notice that I actually went with the first one all the way through and that gave me my marking for the second one and now if we if we will we'll have we want to have those points pretty much right on each other now once this is done we'll go in with some tape and we'll start like this and make sure like that it stays in place that way all right so now we have a little balancing tool see and this we don't need any more we're going to start with this recycled box here and this is an eighth of an inch and it's the perfect little gauge for the what we're going to do so we're going to start with our first shape and here in the corner and we're going to proceed to cut it out and I think I'm going to try this surgical scalpel here in this case the one I'm the most used to here so don't try to cut all the way through on the first cut it's sometimes tempting to try to get it done faster but it's not necessary always cut away from yourself don't put your hand in front of your the blade coming towards you in this case we see that we actually did pretty much go through so much for my advice but when you go through again you'll find that the blade will actually normally follow the path of least resistance and go straight into the groove here so here's our first shape and we're going to go on with a the second one which is going to be a little longer like this and here we go and goodness that's a brand new blade so here is our first this will correspond to actually to this part and the bottom of the of this mobile here I don't know if you see it well everything starts from the bottom in the mobile making if you were to imagine making a mobile from the top every time you had a balancing Point you'd have to every time you added something you'd have to change every balancing point that was made up so if you want to have a vision of what happens to naughty people that's what it is that's their assignment maker mobile from the top um in this case we want to have these space just about EA and we have to find out where the balancing point will be for this particular piece so that it stays in that position so what we do in this case is we're going to actually going to use the brand new one why not here and see if it works we might have to tweak it so okay now this is this is a little delicate part here so this is about where you want to have your balancing point and then once you've got it you just press your little and I have these little pins here to make it a little wider here so this is I got my my first balancing point you might see it more on here okay so and I position this right here and I'm going to take the vertical of this point and I'm going to decide that that's going to articulate right here this one I don't need to make a balancing point for since that's a given okay now here okay you want we also had on our list we also had a these little things here let's see paper clips or wire we'll we'll use both so you can see how we can use it in this case we're going to see if we have I have two types of paper clips but that gives us actually Four sizes of of length uh let's take let's take this one in this case we'll just take off a little piece right here and that will be one of our second size here so then you thread it this way and there you go now we got our we got this going where is my balancing tool here so whoop you see I'm gonna go further up here so that's about right yeah okay gives me a good line here okay so now you'll need a little string with a hook to eventually all go go to the effect and see if it how it works okay so it's moving I like that's good okay now we have I like those paper clips they're really neat all right so we in this particular case we're just gonna use this portion here it would be nice if we could just go and use our drawing but we'll just have to bring it in a little so that's probably going to be like this and it's going to be like this and let's just sort of yeah that's going to be fun so here so you keep your hands out of the the path that's really important I'm afraid I sort of made the wrong I sort of you can always see when their first line isn't too good that you can always go back and cheat a little okay there you go so now we're going to articulate this one again against our balancing point and we're going to choose our tie up right here and in this case we might still be able to use one of these guys they know that's what we'll do and we're going to cut some part of it off right here okay oh all right there you go okay here we go again so so you're always balancing one object at a time you're not it's you only have one balancing point to worry about and it's the last one on the top here now there we go all right so let's see what this gives us yeah that's nice yeah okay okay now in in this at this particular juncture I would like to point out to a couple of things you notice that the shapes are going bigger it doesn't have to be that way you can start with larger shapes at the bottom and go the other way around but you still need to have a certain Rhythm and a certain progression and and I always like to point out the fact that mobiles are very much like music in other words they're they're constructed of out of a motive of a of a shape and they they use Rhythm and they use numbers and in this case for instance we have three pieces and and it's like a flower arrangements you always it's sometimes nicer to have odd numbers don't ask me why I think it has to do with proportion and all the other stuff it it it's a very much in this in this particular juncture we don't have to go too deeply into numerology or whatever um no I don't think I'm going to get anything out of this shape so we're going to have to go to the next here at this level I'm thinking I want to want to go in the other direction and this is a little going on in One Direction I'm going to now go the other way um but I could I could choose to go directly with a long shape like that or I could put a little Counterpoint here Counterpoint we've got another musical term here um so you notice I don't I don't have a drawing all the way through I mean this is this is uh I've been doing this quite some time now I have this in in my mind what I like to do but you can once you know what it's supposed to look like at the end you can go ahead and make a full drawing before you go any further okay that's going to be my Counterpoint here it's going to be huh okay so here we go okay now I don't like this one I'm gonna have to give it a little curve here and same here okay so this is going to be another position of given so to speak and I'm going to center it right here okay well in this case I'm I'm seeing I'm going to need something a little longer here so we're going to use some wire actually I'm going to go ahead and use so in this case you need to massage it a little and straighten it out because otherwise it puts all sorts of Hanks right and so here and then I'll use this little what should we call it player pliers and I'm going to decide how far I want it right here and here we go how to make your own paper clips turn it around okay here we go so here you leave a little more you can have a little threader that way you can easily go through here there we go so then you take that other part off because if you take it out later it might put you out of balance so now we got it okay now we know the balancing point it's getting boring isn't it I mean it's just huh you always add a little last two be able to hang it like this there you go so that's how you make a mobile when it comes to the color schemes you're on your own basically you can do whatever you want the things to remember is that water-based paints will warp your cardboard so it'd be better in a way if you can use oil based but you you can always let them dry and then assemble them later or make sure that they dry flat once you've already assembled it that's the lesson for today I hope you enjoyed it thank you very much

Channel: longtimers

Views: 225,341

Keywords: mobile, Caulder, Laurent, Davidson, art, lesson

Id: b5GTUM-Q2g0

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 12 2009