To all of my (imaginary) readers out there, I apologize for the lack of posting I've been doing on here lately. Now, I could write one of those long complaint blogs about "how busy I've been" or "how hard college is", but I won't. Instead, since (for what it's worth) this is a blog centered on the visual arts, I'll just give you a visual representation of what my second semester has been:
(cliché, but this is what 18 credits of architecture major would
look like if it weren't for the nuclear fallout, mutations, and the
large amount of death and destruction*)
ANYWAYS.
I know most of you are probably busy on facebook, twitter, chatroulette, stumbeupon, or myspace (god forbid), so I'll just give you a drive-by of my work from the past month or two:
(quick side note: the main idea behind our first projects this semester was centered around Tyrone, a small economically depressed town outside of State College. We took a field trip there, and were each told to go to the local antique store and pick up an item whose form attracted us.)
I PICKED DIS ONE:
Decorative, blue acrylic grapes.
This is the "wall of inspiration". Four days, 32 drawings a piece. 16 of our object, 16 of someone else's:
(fifth column from the left is mine, the other column's out of frame)
We all also did tech drawings of our object (see if I can post those later). We then constructed a skin-and-bones model of the other person's object we drew earlier:
Additionally, in our Viscomm class (essentially a class for Adobe CS4) we worked on two photoshop projects based on the object. The first explains my idea for the project itself (the grapes as multiple real world objects), the second illustrating its history (the image of a designer at his desk, designing the grapes as a dining room centerpiece):
(Also, the third photoshop project we did was unrelated to the grapes, but more focused on Tyrone and its history, sort of "bridging the gap" between eras)
The design process then began to, based off of our object, the form model someone else made of our object, and some of our own ideas, design an industrial work lamp. We did preliminary working drawings, assembled our lamp, and then did "idealized" drawings, perfecting the lamp we had constructed. I have no drawings to post because i haven't felt like scanning them and all that, but lemme tells ya, they were good.
A week and a half of straight work in the wood shop, three trips to Lowes, an all-nighter last Sunday, and one terrible tore-me-apart crit later, I had this:
Now, my overall presentation was pretty good, an I even built a special rig for this baby to hang from. The wiring worked, the stain was exactly right, and the color of the shade was great; it would have been perfect, had every single one of my epoxy bonds not failed. Let me add: ignorant of adhesives, I bonded the whole thing with epoxy. Stuff is shit for this kind of thing.
For what appeared to be shoddy craftsmanship, my professor ripped into me like a fat kid into a cake.
It's cool though, the issues brought up by the crit have been resolved for the most part, and I explained to my prof how much work I did exactly put into this, and that all that failed in this project was the FUCKING GLUE.
Now, I'm seeing if I can rebuild this bad boy, and make a lamp I can be proud of. We'll see. I'll definitely be posting the results.
*There is still death and destruction.
