Giant Spin Art

Ok - while this isn't purely a post about marketing, it does present a valid point for yoot marketers. You need to get out and meet your demographic! I will give you all the benefit of the doubt, and call you adults. There is nothing that can replace the experience of getting out into the environments where youth and teens are spending their days, interacting with your brands, using their mobile devices, etc....and just observing. Seriously, if you are marketing to teens, and you don't go to the mall to just watch teenagers (in a totally non creepy, non stalkerish way, of course) you are not going to be an effective youth marketer.

Ok - on to the fun. Giant Spin Art!!

I based the project on the Giant Spin Art machine from Make Magazine Volume 25 - and the Make:Projects blog post that had some more details on their version. I wanted to make a version that was even more robust and could stand up to a whole days use, and also paint on a stretched canvas rather than just a piece of paper.  So I started out using a router as my motor instead of the hand drill used in the original project.

After flinging a few canvases across my workshop - I concluded that the non-varaiable speed router I was using was way too powerful and went back to the drill as a motor. I think a router would work, and hold up to a full days use better than the drill (which got very hot and was on the verge of burning out) but it would absolutely have to be variable speed router. Next time.

Also - check out the way the canvases appear bent in the iPhone picture. They aren't really bending - this is an interesting effect of the way iPhone's take pictures of spinning objects. The iphone calls it a "rolling shutter" - here are some pictures that show the same effect in other situations.

  

Here is one of my own spin art creations - this is a 24" canvas.  Also - pics of the machine I built.  We went to test it out at a small festival at the end of a July 4th Parade to test the waters. I would definitely call this test a success - people were lined up literally until they shut down the power on us. That was a 3 hour test - next stop, a whole day festival!