Art Project Help

[jordan]

Hey everyone. I need a bit of help with the design for my art project. We're working with sculptures of human figures and part of mine is going to be veins. To do the veins I could pretty easily get clear tubing and fill it with red and blue liquids. But to make it even better, I wanted to be able to turn the lights off and halve the only light be that which is running through the veins, almost like fiberoptics. Fiberoptics only release the light at the end though. I want something that you can see light the whole way (so they look like veins obviously). Are there any tricks here to get the light to travel through the veins further? How far do you think I could get it to go?

[Phi for All]

I've seen Christmas and arcade lights that use clear tubing and have lights synced to travel down the length of the tubing. Here's a link for rope lighting that may work for you. Looks kind of pricey to me because of the controller.

 

You might also try running some kind of phosphorescent liquid or paint through clear tubing. That way you get the effect you want when you turn out the lights.

[jordan]

Thanks Phi, rope lighting is decent but doesn't have the liquidy feel I'm going for. I'll have to look into phosphorescent paint...that might work really well.

[Phi for All]

This place has a ton of glow-in-the-dark solutions, including powders you can mix in water. It would be really cool if you could rig an aquarium pump to actually show the glowing stuff moving through the veins. I wonder if you could rig something to turn the pump on and off in time to a heartbeat? If you also had the sound of a heart beat it was timed to it would be totally wicked!

[jordan]

Sweet find! and sweet idea too. I'm beginning to think this might be getting a little too complex to fit into time constraints...but I'm gonna look into it. There's another idea I have that will be slightly less time consuming. And I would like red and blue for the viens but it says the red only glows very briefly and there isn't much blue at all on the site. And green blood would be kinda weird... ah the joys of under under strict time constraints...