The piano, basic walls and floor of my little music video cafe

My clay stop-motion music video project is underway. As you can see, I have the floor and walls of the little set done!

I started out with the idea of a living room in a house where the pianist (Mike), sax-man (Warren), and I (vocalist) are rehearsing, but when I saw the little black and white tile squares for only $2.40 per square foot at Home Depot, I knew it had to be a small cafe instead of a living room. That tile just screamed cafe to me. And knowing I only needed six of those tile squares because the whole thing is only 3' wide by 2' deep, how could I resist?

I cut the three walls from old Grand Valley Magazine cover posters (felt strange cutting them up like that); my husband sprayed them with wall texture stuff and painted them yellow. I have no idea what color cafe walls are supposed to be, but yellow paint is what we had, so this cafe's walls are yellow.

The table cloths were cut from...
an old checked picnic tablecloth. The glass and "chrome" stools are spice jars. The table bases shown in the photo are just water glasses, which I've since replaced with permanent bases.

I pieced together the rickety piano from the poster scraps left over from the walls. I only had Elmers glue, which does not dry very fast, so it was quite an ordeal getting all the pieces to stay together -- it fell apart more than a few times. I chose red because... well, it was either that or blue and I've seen a red piano, but never a blue one. Hey, it's for little clay characters, so what the heck?

The sheet music on the piano is from my Fake Book that I use on gigs that I reduced and reduced and reduced on the copier. The song is "Since I Fell for You," which is the song I recorded with Mike Gazdak (piano) and Warren Jones (sax) that I plan on using for this little music video. (The song is on my YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvgUgXk6T9I if you want to hear it.)

I still have to attach the wall piece over the door of the cafe and run a stick or rod or something through it connecting to the door so it will open and close properly.

An artist friend, Nikki Sandoval, is creating the little artwork to decorate the walls. She has some really cool ideas. Looking forward to seeing what she comes up with!

I work on this silly little project a little at a time as I have time. I'll likely start working on the table items next, such as plates, bread in bread baskets, wine bottles, wine glasses and so on. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do that just yet. I have a couple of small packs of paperclay that I may use for those items because when the paperclay dries, it is real easy to paint. We'll see. And yes, I'm having way too much fun with this project!