More etsy Tweeks

A few more tweeks have been made to the etsy store and my partner has also started his own store for hand made bird houses and other cool things made of wood.  Check out my store at:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/blaylocksteamworks?ref=si_shop

And look for the bird house store at:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/BlueRidgeBirdHouses?ref=si_shop

The bird houses and other items that James makes may not all be in the actual steampunk realm, they are all really well made plus interesting and beautiful.  As we continue to build or stores we will noth have a lot more items for sale so check them out.

Excelsior etsy Banner

This a new banner I created a few days ago to put on the top of my etsy store for the Blaylock Steamworks Emporium. It's taken from the photo I did last fall of my Excelsior Goggles and top hat. I will probably keep working on a few more.

Gauge Faces

I found a site a few days ago that talked about printing your very own custom gauge faces for your car or truck's instrument panel.  This would help one to know that whether they were obeying the letter of the traffic law or sticking it to the man by endangering themselves and others they could do it in their very own style.  But this also signaled (get it?) to me that I could custom design my own steampunk gauges for various instrumentation.  You can pick up a pack of printable transparencies at an office supply store that allow you to print on one side and make your own gauges.  The first design I found was this fairly basic speedometer face:

By taking a little time in Photoshop I was able to remove several of the original features of this gauge and start cleaning things up to try to get more into the realm of a general instrument to measure whatever might be needed in supra-Victorian science.

I removed the main indicator hand because presumably when I print this new face out I will place it into a gauge that will have a real arrow to replace the pictured one.  The numbers indicated here are also a little too much like something on a dashboard so I took them out too.

I then copied the small empty box on the left hand side of the original gauge and put another one on the right side.  Then I filled it with a little bit of red to indicate that this would be the dangerous end of the spectrum for our measurements.

Changing the background color of the faceplate allowed me to make this one looks a little less clean than the original pic and I also came up with a name for this instrument.  This aetherometer would obviously be used to monitor the amount of pressure of particulate interaction within the aether itself.  Very useful when manning a personal airship.  I will probably try to also find some sort of gradient pattern to superimpose over the face to try to give a more aged appearance.







Steampunk Flight Dock

"This is a view of an airship leaving the local flight dock used for all medium sized skycraft in the area. The cityscape was never the same once the flight docks started becoming a regular feature and cropped up everywhere. Personal airships opened up the skies for exploration such as mankind had never seen before and the intrepid adventurers who braved the winds became both heroes and villains. Much like humanity in any other situation."

~

I was able to find a few places around my neighborhood that are very industrial and helped to supply me with the raw photo materials I needed to put this scene together. The different elements were treated to a few filters in Photoshop and then arranged to make the final picture.

Steampunk Contest

The good folks at WeLoveFine Shop are putting on a contest to see who can come up with the best piece of steampunk art for them to use on a new t-shirt design.  I just found out about the contest myself today on DeviantArt and it is only open until October 3rd.  But the grand prize is $2000 so that seems like pretty good motivation to try to come up with something.  Click over and check it out.

https://www.welovefine.com/contest.php?id_contest=3

P.S.:  Thanks for the 100 views on my blog.