This was my favorite project so far in this class, and also the one I am most proud of! There are always more things I’d like to change, but I actually impressed myself.
BREAK DOWN/BUILD UP EXERCISE
I did rush a little on this exercise so my execution was a little lacking, but I think I did a good job with the overall concept and understanding the break down/build up process.
ABSTRACTIONS
I did A LOT – not to be extra, but because I wanted to give myself lots of options to work with later on. The goats were my on-campus forms (I got to do goat yoga!!) I enjoyed breaking down the forms and found it pretty easy; it would have been relaxing if I didn’t have a million other things to do. As far as identifying the essential components, I think I did a pretty good job. One of my strengths was that I chose to overlap certain pieces if I felt like that would provide a better description of both the individual parts and the whole.
ITERATIONS
I chose a goat, a cuttlefish, and a woman holding an umbrella. From the 15 iterations, I narrowed it down to my 5 favorites – a grabber tool and a lamp from the goat, a spaceship and a recliner from the cuttlefish, and a baby carriage from the woman holding the umbrella. If I could have made two of my final constructions from the same original form, I probably would have chosen the recliner for ‘supports a person,’ but since the spaceship was the only thing I made that could contain multiple people, I chose not to use the recliner and instead went with the baby carriage. That left the object for use by one person to come from the goat; I picked the grabber tool over the lamp because it was more unique and interesting, and the forms worked better in this construction.
RECONSTRUCTION
I was pretty scared to start adding detail into these new forms because I had to imagine and create it all myself, something I hadn’t done yet. It wasn’t too bad once I started, though, and I looked up some reference images to help me understand how certain materials would look.
The following videos are time lapse recordings from Procreate so you can see how I went about building up detail in the objects:
FINAL PIECES
Goat to grabber tool: object for use by one person
Woman with umbrella to baby carriage: object that could support one person
Cuttlefish to spaceship: volumetric structure that could contain more than one person
Overall, I really enjoyed this project and I’m very pleased with my work! I much prefer working digitally, and the whole idea of breaking something down into seemingly arbitrary parts and then creating something new was really cool. I’m really happy with my final rendered pieces – even though they aren’t perfect (nothing ever is) I keep seeing improvement. Yay for practice makes progress!
REFERENCE IMAGES
Supplier #2252. “Woman Holding Umbrella, Stock Image.” Google Image Result for Https://d2gg9evh47fn9z.Cloudfront.net/800px_COLOURBOX4186128.Jpg, Colourbox, 1 June 2012, images.app.goo.gl/d279ZzaSxQAZRSWr8.
Dasgupta, Ajay. “A Fish with Three Hearts: Cuttlefish.” Google Image Result for Https://Www.pitara.com/Wordpress/Wp-Content/Uploads/2002/03/Cuttlefish.jpg, Pitara, images.app.goo.gl/Tagi7dtR1pQFmcgx5.