Anyway, I’ve always liked the Bialetti logo. The cute, but proud, little italian man. As I was waiting for the coffee to finish, I looked at the little man and realized it shouldn’t be difficult to make him in 3D. Not the smartest thought to get when you are trying to do some work, but it did appear anyway.

Trying to find the Bialetti logo in a resolution good enough to be used as a backdrop for the 3D model, I stumbled across a website where I learned this:

Between 1957 and 1977, Carosello [the Carousel] was a 10-minute spot of advertising broadcast every night on Italian national television immediately after the evening news. More like a variety show than hard-sell publicity, it was so popular that it became normal practice in Italian households that dopo Carosello, tutti a nanna (‘all the kids to bed after Carosello’). A familiar cartoon figure on Carosello was the ‘little man with a moustache’, who had his finger raised high in the air while his mouth formed the letters of the alphabet. He was a caricature of Alfonso Bialetti (1888-1970), founder of Bialetti Industrie S.p.A., the Italian cookware giant, and the inventor of the Moka Express coffee pot.

You can read the rest of the story at theflorentine.net.

I’m not the fastest modeller, but I wasn’t aiming for stress either, so I spent about 2 hours on the sketch. Still not finished though -Alfonso is missing his jacket and vest- but that’ll come sometime. With this sketch I wanted to catch the overall scale and feel of Alfonso. Later, I’ll use it as a template for a high resolution model.

At sunday, nov 30th, I headed up to Cecilie & Rune‘s flat for a creative workshop. The whole idea was just to have fun while fiddling with Super Sculpey and whatnot. I packed some of my tools and as I was on my way out, I thought about what to sculpt. I had no idea, so I grabbed a book that was small enough to fit in my bag.

The book is called “The Black Frog’s Doodles – you know… teapots and stuff” and is filled with beautifully drawn sketches by the french artist Igor-Alban Chevalier aka The Black Frog. Flipping through the pages I stumbled across a page with the drawing of Fritz Leopold. As I was only going to stay for about half a day, Fritz seemed like the perfect size for a few hours worth of sculpting.

Not so long ago I read that boiling your Super Sculpey model is in many ways better than burning it in the oven. The heat gets spread more evenly around the sculpture. Fritz was initially going to be boiled, but the cigar worried me a bit. It’s quite small, so I was afraid it would fall off (allthough there’s a secretly hidden piece of metal wire on the inside of the cigar, attaching it to Fritz’ mouth). Anyway, he went into the oven on about 120°C for about an hour.

After uploading the pictures to flickr I thought I’d send Igor-Alban an e-mail, telling him about how Fritz made into the third dimension. He replied only moments later, with something in the lines of “Ahahahaha Excellent!”. I guess he liked it

Check out Fritz for yourself at my flickr set “Stuff I’ve made“.

The future plans for Fritz is to sand down the worst parts and then paint him. I’m also playing with the idea of making a mold so that I can replicate him. I’m not sure yet. What ever might happend, I’ll post more pictures to the flickr set and articles here.