final design lab project: 3d forms
--
April 20, 2021
I started with making my starfish out of clay. This took me maybe around half an hour to 45 minutes?
It was definitely a little bit of a learning curve to work with the clay. I haven’t made anything out of clay in a good six years, so it took me a little while to get the hang of it.
I ended up having to redo a lot of this starfish because other things I changed messed up things I had already made. I learned that it’s important to get the overall shape and volume right first, then do the underside indentation and curve up the arms, and then finally add details like the slits on the bottom and the spikes on the top. This will probably be helpful in future versions!
Right now, the center radius (?) is a little bit too large as compared to my model. It needs to be pinched in a little tighter towards the middle. I also didn’t add much detail or texture to the arms/underside of the starfish, and didn’t especially try to make the spikes a perfect match. (Some of them are chipped, etc.) I’m not sure how accurate I should try to get with the clay versus the soap, and that’s definitely something I plan to try to figure out during class on Thursday.
April 26
I revised my clay starfish a little bit. I tightened up the center radius so it matches the original starfish better, and I added a lot more detail to the bottom of the starfish.
Then I moved on to my second starfish model. I started with my Dial soap that I had ordered at the beginning of the semester.
I shaved off the top logo, and then started cutting out the general shape of the arms. Unfortunately, the last arm broke off as I was trying to cut it out.
I got pretty frustrated, so I decided to try using paper. That went even worse. I ended up with this as a base of my first draft and absolutely hated it, so I went back to soap.
I was able to borrow some of a different kind of soap from Elise, which I liked a lot better. The shape was easier to work with, and the consistency was less brittle, which I liked.
The first one, though, I accidentally shaved one of the arms way too thin. John happened to be going to the store, so he picked me up some more of this kind of soap and I went back to work. I borrowed some soap carving tools that Elise happened to have, and this time finally worked. Sort of.
I know a lot of the proportions are way off. I was just having a really hard time finding any bar of soap that’s big enough that I can carve the whole star out of without it being either EXTREMELY tiny and therefore barely detailed at all, or having wonky proportions.
Sooooo after a fair amount of consideration I decided to switch shells. I knew it would be faster to make a new clay model and carve a soap model of a different type of shell than it would be to refine and work with any existing soap bars I had and try to get a starfish out of them.
Here are the photos of those versions.
There are some irregularities in the soap shell. Those are because I had originally started using that bar of soap to make a soap starfish, but ended up not using it for that. I didn’t want to use my only remaining bar of soap to make my first draft of this shell, so I reused that piece. Hopefully the little cuts don’t detract too much from your understanding of the original form. I’ll probably create a new version after getting feedback on this one.
April 28
I made a clay mouse today! This one was pretty easy, especially after making two different shell models out of clay.
The bottom isn’t quite shaped right. The back of the bottom needs to be rounder than it currently is. But I think the rest of it is pretty good.
April 30
Today I finished my paper form (which I started yesterday) and refined my three other forms.
May 4
After getting feedback from Daphne on my paper form, I made some modifications. I created an entirely new form because I decided to construct it differently. My old model only had slits cut into the papers going in one axis, but on this one I cut a slit partway down each piece of paper in order to avoid having that edge sticking out of the bottom like it did in my original model.
I also added a piece going diagonally to the front and to the back to help give the model some more volume and defined edges.
