The New Rig: From the drawing board to the shop [Part 1]

Miss Kansas is over for this year and I am back home trying to figure out where to put this massive easel rig of mine.

Many of you who were following my journey throughout the year and especially this week have seen pictures and video footage of the final performance. However, I thought I might let you in on the genesis of this whole idea and how the whole idea was formed...

It all started in New York City...

My dad and I spent a few days in NYC over spring break - mostly to spend time together in the Big Apple, but also with the mindset to come up with something stellar to present at Miss Kansas. We went to the MoMA as well as the Society of Illustrators museum in hopes of coming up with a grand idea.

It was when we were sitting in the Hard Rock Cafe just off Times Square when we broke out the pen and paper to really put down some concrete ideas.

Earlier in the year, I had posted on Facebook asking people what they wanted to see in a live painting. I was actually asking for subject matter ideas...but the people wanted multiple canvases. So for the upcoming performance at the time for KU's Got Talent, I embarked on the adventure to paint on three canvases.

So as we were brainstorming for the Miss Kansas pageant, the idea hung in our heads of how to manipulate the use of multiple canvases or panels without separate easels for each one. We toyed with the idea of painting on glass, or painting in glue with glitter thrown at the end, or simply doing the same rig I had last year. But of course that was really out of the question.

At some point in the brainstorm process at Hard Rock, we decided upon a patriotic theme with a tri-panel approach. (Forgive the salute with the wrong hand... I was ignorant to details at this point.) I don't have pictures of all my sketches, as they were on the back of a placemat and got lost at some point, but take a look at the very first visualizations of this crazy idea:

 What you see here, and will realize later on as you scroll through pictures of the real deal, is that even though my dad and I had NO idea how this thing would actually work, we had a pretty solid concept to start with that ended up being eerily accurate to the final product.

 

I returned to Kansas, not entirely sure how I was going to pull this off. I approached the man who runs the Common Shop in the art building, Cotter. I explained the whole idea to him in a long winded monologue and when I finished, he looks at me and says, "Okay... what's this for....?" And I said, "Well, I'm using it as my final for this one studio course I'm in but...end-game... I'm competing to be Miss Kansas..."

Okay PAUSE. Let's note that I was meeting with him between having an 8 am studio and about to go to the gym, so I was definitely nottttt up to pageant-par. 

So Cotter looks at me and says, "Yeah you sure look like it," in jest, of course. And then looks back down at the sketches and says, "We're gonna win this." Not only did I just attain an incredible mind to help me engineer this easel, but he proceeded to tell me how he lived down the street from Debbie Barnes, one of our Miss Kansas's who proceeded to win Miss America and how she babysat him as a child. Who knew!!

And the building process began.

I made a moquette out of cardstock paper to create a visual 3-D representation of what we wanted to happen. Following that display, I used a large sheet of foam core to develop the dimensions I wanted, the height, and make sure it would fit in the back of my Prius before we started building the actual thing.

I have to give all the credit to Cotter for materializing this rig and coming up with the engineering genius. Each panel is sustained on a separate track. There are three holes at the top of each panel that function with three individual pegs at different heights that are inserted from the back.

Each pin is pulled to release each panel at an isolated moment with a nib that catches the panel at the bottom so that it doesn't fall forward. The video to the left is the first time I saw it work. Apparently the first time Cotter released the first panel on our prototype version, the entire bottom edge blew off from the force, which is why you can see that is it reinforced in the version in the video.

I came in every day after my morning studio course to trouble shoot and bounce around ideas with Cotter. After seeing how this first version worked, we decided to elongate the entire surface so that the last panel drop wasn't so whimpy - and added a few more inches for it to fall in the final version.






The entire thing is assembled with only four pieces and two screws excluding the three panels and fits in the back of a Prius. This made things wonderfully simple as I transferred the rig to my house, back to the art building, back to my house, and then finally to Pratt for the competition.

I'll post another blog about the actual painting process... this is getting lengthy!

- Annika Wooton

Miss Greater Wichita