A bizarre title for a thread, huh? I thought so too.
A few weeks ago whilst my girlfriend and I were making our way around a maze even more deviously designed and far more complex to navigate than Catwoman's (or "IKEA" as everyone else seems to call it), when Jess called me over to where she was standing and pointed at an item on the floor and promptly looked at me and waited for my face "light up"...
We were looking at IKEA's "PS 2017 Floor Lamp".
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10333800/
Now let me be the first person to point out the obvious; no it's not an exact replica of the Bat-Signal we saw in the '66 TV show and feature film, but with it's Art-Deco styling, the added charm of its sheer size and the fact it came in Navy Blue, my Bat-Customization Cogs started whirring immediately. This otherwise seemingly never ending trip to Swedish-furniture-Purgatory was infinitely improved by the fact I was now hopefully on a few simple steps away from having my very own Bat-Signal in my home-office.
After un-boxing, assembling and positioning the floor lamp where I had envisaged it living, my first step was to decipher whether or not the accompanying front panel would sufficiently allow me to somewhat project a Bat-Signal onto the sloping ceiling of my home office. A few failed hand shadow puppet performances later and I decided that the existing front panel was slightly too thick and the finish most certainly too frosted for my purposes.
Living on the top floor of an apartment building and having neither the garage space nor tools to fabricate the parts for my project, I set about measuring and subsequently ordering a custom-cut replacement front panel for my lamp in 3mm clear acrylic plastic.
The next step was to figure out how I was going to create a TV style Bat-Signal logo to adorn the front of the lamp. It's a reasonably well known fact that I cannot draw to save my life (heck that's why I take pictures for a living). During our initial conversations in the car en route home from IKEA we initially flirted with the idea of Jess hand-painting straight onto the panel. As we grew closer to home and put an increasingly pleasing amount of miles between ourselves the aforementioned furniture metropolis, the idea shifted towards creating a decal or vinyl of some sort instead perhaps. Having given it more additional thought over the following days than I should probably admit, it occurred to me that there were potential implications of the warmth from the lamp eventually interfering with the adhesive of a decal. I decided that the more permanent and far cooler-looking option was to have the Bat logo also cut out in acrylic plastic.
Scott kindly took to Adobe Illustrator and digitally re-created my desired Bat-Signal logo from a Blu-Ray screen capture of a Bat-Spin.
From here on in it was just a case of drilling the five appropriate screw holes in relation to the original front panel and then assembling my new custom made acrylic components with some terrifyingly heavy-duty glue, that no doubt had the capacity to very well haunt you in your sleep.
My finished Bat-Signal ready for display.
If you'll continue to grant me some further Bat-poetic-license, I figured what better way to turn my Bat-Signal on and off than via my Shakespeare Bust.
