I’ve had a difficult time featuring some projects on my wood shop themed YouTube channel when most of the work on those projects is idea generation and engineering rather than woodworking. It’s true, there is going to be some wood involved for sure. I mean, I can’t really wake up in the morning without some fresh roasted hardwood sawdust wafting in the air. Mmmm. Smell that freshly sawn buttery white oak. It’s like I’m baking cookies.

I digress. Back on the topic of engineering and problem solving, I’ve just created a new page on this site dedicated to those projects that are more about technical design, mechanical engineering and the use of new materials other than wood in the creative process. It’s called the Maker’s Nerd Lab and features our newest nerd-like project; an 8 foot, stand up fiberglass paddle board.

Some of the wildest ideas that pop into my head also involve mechanical motion to little wooden parts, and those projects seem to be equally challenging and rewarding. It’s all about figuring out HOW the pieces and parts work together and that takes far more time than any wood cutting or shaping work. I will noodle over rotational motion issues or how to bring power to components of a sculpture or a toy. Sometimes original ideas I have for a project get completely scrapped when I test out a finished piece only to find out it doesn’t work with other components on the project. It was just an idea gone bad. Sort of like the time I used construction adhesive to fill a hole in my favorite wood shop shoes. I don’t have a really witty joke as a follow up there. It was just a bad idea that felt like walking with a rock in your sole. Rocky shoes? “ADRIAN!”

Wild ideas manifest themselves into designs that sometimes fail miserably like in the marble machine build where a custom shaped Walnut basketball hoop was supposed to catch and redirect falling marbles down a ramp. In testing, it only worked about 50% of the time. It was no Michael Jordan. I wound up swapping that idea out for a jump ramp that launched marbles into a catch basin. That worked well enough to keep and tweak until it finally worked consistently. There’s nothing like flying and falling marbles to catch a young person’s attention and in that regard, the marble machine was a success. Was there wood involved? Absolutely. Did the woodworking take more time than the nerd design and engineering time? Absolutely not.

Other new ideas are brewing that are even less about woodworking. If you scan through our YouTube channel’s content you’ll find a couple attempts at recreating some famous artwork by Jackson Pollock. The videos weren’t too popular because they don’t really fit into the world of woodworking, but this blog is all about being a maker. It was for me an incredibly distant stretch goal because I’ve never had any artistic painting or drawing ability whatsoever. I can’t seem to recreate anything that looks realistic, but modern art? Yes, I can paint shapes and curves, I can blend colors, I can identify layers of color in the artwork and I can study and mimic basic designs I find on the interwebs.

I tend to nerd out on a project like that because it was new and challenging and I felt like I could study the artwork long enough to spot layers of color and the steps the artist took to build up those colors into a finished piece. No, the quality of my painting is never all that great. The colors don’t really match the original work. My techniques are amateurish at best. But, the outcome isn’t really all that bad. I mean it looks as good or better than the over priced wall hangings you can purchase at a Home Goods or At Home decorating store and it only cost me the price of a canvas and some paint. At a family holiday event a couple years ago, one of my relatives commented to my wife on how much they liked the large artwork hanging in our dining room. It was a simplistic interpretation of a Jackson Pollock work called “Blue Poles”. “Where did you find that”, they asked. “Mark made it”, my wife replied. “No way”, was the response. Yes, way. All you have to do is let that wild nerd like hair on your butt motivate you to give something like that a try.

All of the above is a preamble to upcoming projects that pay homage to a couple of my favorite designers or artists; Frank Lloyd Wright and once again, Jackson Pollock. The FLW project will involve wood as a means to replicate a stained glass design that Frank wasn’t too famous for though it was a significant enough design to be found in his personal home and studio in Chicago. I’ve also wanted to pair up one of my older Pollock paintings with another to balance the wall opposite my basement office space. I found a complimentary artwork from Pollock to use as inspiration and I’m studying the color overlays now.

My point is, I guess if there is a point to be made, is that creativity shouldn’t be bound by a particular craft like woodworking. Being a “Maker” means to be creative regardless of the materials you might choose to use towards that end. So while my YouTube channel and most of this website is dedicated to wood shop stuff, it isn’t all there is to do. I find myself nerding out on a whole variety of other projects too and now there’s a home to display them. I hope you might inspired to give one of those projects a try even if you’ve never done anything like it before. That’s the really satisfying part anyway.

More to come on the Frank Lloyd Wright stained glass design and the Jackson Pollock painting. That nerd hair on the bottom of my butt is starting to itch.