Camera Mount for the Jeep
There are some beautiful trees lining Cave Creek Road that I pass every morning while taking my son to school. Amidst all of the construction up there they have spray pained red "X"s on each of the trees and have begun to flatten them! I have wanted to use them for models for sketching for a while now and realized that my time is running out! It is too dangerous to sketch on site so I invented this odd thing. Is is a dashboard mount for my video camera that I used to tape the trees on my commute to and from Jonny's school. It worked like a champ (the second design anyway). The first idea seemed great but was still too slippery on my plastic dashboard even with the rubber coating.

I got about 14 minutes of video of some excellent trees which I slowed down. Of the 200 or so trees at least 30 or so are works of art. They were probably sculpted in minutes by a guy in a plastic hard hat but most of them are amazing! I'll try to get some still from the tape to post here shortly.

First attempt: An 8" circle with a sponge shock absorber dipped in liquid rubber.

The winning model: A cut-to-fit insert (with camera mount) for the glasses tray of the Jeep dashboard. This one worked perfectly!

And a first sloppy attempt at one of the trees - I need LOTS more practice, dang!