i made furry art for Caltech by Anika H. '26
i have art powers and choose to use them for chaos
Tetazoo has historically been friends with Blacker, a dorm at Caltech. So when mystery hunt rolled around this year and Caltech was flying over to stay with us, we decided to give them a warm welcome by trying to unsettle them as much as possible. While Urban Walcott urbanized with two strips of colored LEDs lining the hallway, a bunch of the hall frosh built a beautiful shrine with linkedin pictures of all of our visitors faces pinned to a corkboard after only two hours of professional stalking. I unfortunately didn’t help with most of these things (other than sourcing four very long ethernet cables for the lights from the loading docks), but I did fill the whiteboard with various drawings. I wanted something truly representative of Tetazoo and Blacker’s love for each other.
Tim x Bucky
But then I thought, maybe it’s missing something. What happened to the other colleges? There surely has to be some foil to show how deeply enamored we are with each other. So like a background character in a movie poster, Harvard was drawn weeping in the background. The Harvard mascot’s facial features bear an uncanny similarity to that of Lord Farquaad, so I may have taken some design inspiration from that. Since I didn’t want Harvard to be the only lonely third wheel, I added Stanford. I’m not quite sure what I was aiming for here.
On the last day before Caltech left, as a parting gift, Winnie suggested we turn the drawing into a light up acrylic sign. And because Tetazoo is full of procrastinators, we only started at around 8:00pm. After rushing back from Chipotle, I speedran a more cleaned up digital rendering of the lineart. I sent it to Winnie, who was already at Metropolis and ready to vectorize it. By the time I slid open the door and was munching on the starbursts I snatched from the dispenser, she had already cut two palm-sized test pieces that overlapped to form the whole piece. We put in the 12x 24 piece of acrylic, and I watched the laser cutter for 40 minutes just in case it starts to burn down.
While Winnie was setting up the LED strips, I laser cut a plaque out of red acrylic to go on the base. We were so close to finishing.
“The group photo’s supposed to happen right now, do we wanna head back?”
“They’ll be an hour late, we can finish what we have right now.”
We went back to hall, but Winnie was right. It took an hour to get everyone packed into the lounge, and surprisingly, Tetazoo was not the one holding everyone up. The last few Blacker residents jogged down the hallway and into the frame of the picture. There were two people wearing harnesses on rope, around 5 people on each of the couches, probably more on the table, and Rose was hanging upside down on the ceiling pipes. We held up the unfinished furry lamp at the front like a trophy, and the camera clicked. I forgot exactly what people’s reactions were, but it was probably something like this:
By this point, it was around 2am. I tapped out to finish some stuff for the next day, so Winnie finished the rest of the base herself. It came out beautifully. The next morning, we shoved it in a Caltech student’s suitcase just in time for their (probably agonizing) 8-hour flight back to California.
finished, base and all
That evening, someone texts the group chat, asking for the original lineart. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it, but I sent it over anyway. Just yesterday, he sent a photo of the art, forever painted on some wall on the other side of the country.
shuli said i could make more shitposts
so i did >:D