Amusement Park Art and Century Flyers

This is a little bit of a different post for here, but I hope that you still enjoy it! I'm not artistic whatsoever, but there are ways for even non-artistic people to make something that looks moderately okay, especially with computers and the ability to print out or create templates. In middle school art class, I took advantage of several "open-ended" art projects to make something as a tribute to some of my favorite amusement parks and attractions. No matter how crude these may be, I really enjoy having them as decorations.

This is my favorite, although it is admittedly super dorky. (Who am I kidding; the teacher or any of my friends probably had no idea what I was doing!) :-D Of course, these are the original symbols from EPCOT Center: the whole park with logo, CommuniCore, Living Seas, Imagination, Horizons, Land, Spaceship Earth, and World of Motion. The idea behind this project was to create "wind chimes," and the whole thing, about two feet tall, is made out of clay.

I made them by placing a piece of paper as an outline over the clay and then carving the shapes out, like Land and Imagination, or by adding material bas-relief style, like Spaceship Earth and the big symbol. I realize now that if I had switched Imagination and Living Seas, the arrangement would be the same as they actually are at the park! I forgot to put a hole in the World of Motion symbol, so that one doesn't hang with the rest. I wanted to include Universe of Energy, but I found it difficult to make concentric circles, so that piece got thrown away.

I'm a fan of these symbols because they aren't seen at the park today. With the reinvention of Epcot, Disney is planning to return some of them to Future World along with variants for the new attractions.

I cranked up the color a little bit on my 6th grade printmaking project of the Horizons symbol. The funny thing about this is that every kid gets to stick his or her stamp on a ceiling tile, so one of my Horizons symbols will be left behind for years to come on the school. I also made a multi-color printmaking sheet in 7th grade of Pretzel darkride cars.

Aside from Disney, I have made a couple tributes to my local amusement parks, as well. This is for the Blue Streak at Conneaut Lake Park in NW Pennsylvania. A cool logo was created for the ride's 75th anniversary in 2013 and placed on the station. Using "Perler Beads," which are small plastic beads that can be ironed together, I created a huge template of the logo, made of thousands of beads. It's more than two feet long, so I think that it's a miracle that I somehow didn't ruin this by spilling the beads over the months I worked on it at school.

Blue Streak is one of my favorite ever coasters. I love this ride so much that it's my profile pic. I like its story of survival, having been through many years of standing-but-not-operating status, and it is also such a quirky old ride. It's smooth, yet the bumps are different every go-around and really add to the experience. The classic trains that the ride operated with were given the factory name "Century Flyer" when they were manufactured in the mid-century. 

They are definitely relics from the time period, so I decided to make my own not-quite-proportionate tribute to the front headlight design, which is about half a foot by half a foot.

There were better days on the Blue Streak train when the headlights weren't busted out and the stainless steel was gleaming. Take this 1997 picture, found on a website of the American Coaster Enthusiasts.

Strangely, the three parks in the world that still run this style of train are all in PA and West Virginia. This is Kennywood's Thunderbolt, which has removed the center headlight altogether in exchange for the ride logo.

Still, though, the Century Flyer is my favorite roller coaster train ever. Okay, that's enough rambling about something unrelated for now. Thanks for reading!