Doodles: Concept Drafting

I recently teamed up with some of my good Resident Adviser friends to develop an anti-vandalism campaign for our Residence Life office. We discussed and drafted several possible mascots, collectively named Bob the Bandaid. Here's a small preview of some Bobs below.

We are designing Bob to be the main hero of our awareness posters and will continue to flesh out the branding process of Project Bob with the rest of Res Life staff.

Doodles: Digital Mindmap

As a simple exercise in Photoshop layering and masks, my Design Principles class asked us to create a mindmap of ourselves- essentially a self portrait of our perspectives as opposed to our appearances.

The central theme of my mind map is the "lovely melancholy" of wandering. The piece's base layer is an altered image of the Carina Nebula, which is then covered in text from The Little Prince, and my own photographs I have taken of Providence. Outer space, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's novel, and my recent urban travels all tie into my fascination with exploration. I chose to obscure these images within to encourage a visual exploration of the piece as well. I incorporated my fondness of birds (as a grounding focal point) and hexagonal shapes (as a textural quality) as more direct images. As I continued working, my piece morphed into something more mysterious, which I played with to get this end result.

Resident Hallway Signs

 As a Resident Adviser, one of my duties is to keep my dorm floor a quiet and productive environment for everyone. I created some informational signs for my hallway as an easy guide to the school's resources. To fit my floor's spaceship theme, I used a futuristic computer interface aesthetic as implied hallway display screens.

Above is the poster I created as a 36"x 44" bulletin board. Below includes four smaller posters that list additional information.

Theater: Stage

Our second summer production was Godspell, which performed outside on campus. I hadn't known about stagecraft beforehand so assembling staircases and dressing the set was a lot of hard work but great fun!

It's hard to see, but the center stage has two levels, so the band pit is in the center behind the performing area. The catwalk was the connect the stage to the AV equipment off to the far right. The towers are these amazing pieces of sound equipment.

I wasn't needed for additional deck duties in Godspell, but as props master I helped out more in the preliminary set up. You can see a bit of the lighting used in the show above.

Here are also some more set photos from Hello Dolly. Researching and pulling together (a stylized version) period setting was a great experience.

Top: Rich man Vandergelder's feed store. I dressed the shelves behind the counter.

Middle: The trick cake and pheasants in action!

Bottom: A New York hat shop. I helped put together the table set up.

Sewing Basics

Along with my technical theater summer program, I took an introductory course in sewing. Pictured below is my final project, which was to create a top with sleeves.

I purchased the original pattern from a local fabric store, then added my own hood and altered the front to make a open-flap cloak with a fish-eye enclosure. The fabric is cotton broadcloth and the pattern includes gathering (where larger piece of fabric is tucked into a smaller piece to create volumetric folds) and pockets.

The most challenging part of sewing for me was figuring out how to sew pieces together "inside-out" while also treating the edges of the cloth for more durability and neatness (like overlocking or topstitching). Some simple pouches and pillow cases explained the beginning of the inside-out process.

After the pillow came the messenger bag, which introduced lining and interfacing as well as internal pockets. The striped cloth is made of canvas.

Further along in the course, I learned to cut cloth to my size and how to make an elastic waistband in our pajama pants project. The cloth is fleece and the pants include pockets.

I applied some of the techniques I learned for simple theater props, like table cloths and signal flags. I also finally ventured into tailoring my old clothes (and now have some exciting new shorts!)

Theater: Foam Cakes

Hello, Dolly called for an elaborate dance number called the Harmonia Gardens waiter's gallop. Waiters would dance around the stage with cake trays, and needed props that were light and sturdy.

Here is half of the small cakes secured to hand trays. These were rough cut foam pieces in cylindrical shapes. I used various sanding methods and knives to give shape to the cake icing on the top and bottom rims.

I didn't get to paint these cakes myself as another crew member was assigned to do so, but I think the colors are pretty fun.

One of the more complex cakes was what we called the 5-tier trick cake. A clumsy waiter would fumble around with this cake as it wobbled precariously on its tray during the dance number. My instructor found a way to stack rings of polystyrene foam on a fishing rod to get the right wobbling effect and I was assigned the construction of the cake

Here the rings, cut with a bandsaw, have already been glued together and are drying out in the sun with its frosting (made from caulking). The icing swirls are made from squeezing caulking out of a snipped bag- basically treating it like icing anyway. 

Sadly again, I didn't get to paint this one either. Before painting, I sanded any accidental sharp points created from the caulking and brushed all the rings with a layer of glue to keep the caulking from chipping. This is the cake at rest on its home prop table. Below is a clip showing how all the assembled layers wobbled (with my commentary).

 

Theater: Foam Birds

Hello, Dolly has an amazing scene (choreography and dialogue wise) that takes place in a fancy restaurant called Harmonia Gardens. The choreographer wanted a small moment where a waiter skewers a cooked pheasant from a tray, which meant the prop needed to be light and reusable. We placed a funnel inside a foam piece to work around those guidelines.

Just starting the roughing process.

Once the bird got to the fine sanding stage. I joked that the base made it look like a family crest meant to hang on the wall.

The scene later called for a second stationary cooked bird and a separated leg. Here they are with a base coat of primer ready to be fiberglassed for extra protection.

This is the second bird dressed on a dinner plate. Painted it to get a roasted texture.

We ended up scrapping the leg before it could get painted, but the tech crew kept it as a potential prop for future shows. Here I am holding it for scale.

This was my first experience working with fiberglass, and honestly the process worked much more intuitively than I originally expected. I had a lot of fun sculpting and sanding these birds out. It was a great first step getting a feel for these materials, as I'll definitely be using them for future prototyping in Industrial Design.

Theater: Duvatine Silhouette

Here's a simple silhouette I made out of black duvatine. In Hello, Dolly! the titular character mentions her interest in creating silhouettes of celebrities like Ada Rehan and pulls out an example to wow the stage. 

The silhouette is backed with muslin using fabric glue. For easy access, the ends wrap around two dowels so that the piece is stored conveniently rolled up in the main character's purse, ready to be displayed.

  

Preliminary sketching with white china marker. Below is the photo of Ada Rehan I referenced. 

Theater: Woodworking

Saddleback College customizes many of the stage pieces in Hello, Dolly! in their woodshop back stage. Below are three prop wooden crates used in the show. 

I pulled the bottom pre-painted crate from the prop cage as a reference- we wanted a simple, worn style as part of a feed store set. I then constructed the upper two crates to carry a certain number of soup cans and candles, which the script required. The crates were a matter of measuring the boxed items and using the table saw with a staple gun to do the rest.

I used the same techniques to construct flies that would support the background. Here I learned how describe dimension of wood and follow blueprints from my instructor to cut the correct measurement with the chopsaw.

A fuller view of the backstage shop. In the right there are green pieces I used the router on.

Theater: Graphics

I volunteered to create some graphic designs for the main character's business cards as well as the menu for the fancy dinner scene in Hello, Dolly! The graphics needed to be seen from the audience, so I focused mainly on bolded text. I researched products at the turn of the 19th century online and through books in order fits the play's period.

The menus were placed on black masonite as the waiters handled them while dancing.

My instructors decided to use both designs for the business cards and printed them on aged-color cardstock.

Doodles: Happy Birthday

Here is a small graphic I made for a dear friend of mine in Photoshop. The gradient and vector based pattern are inspired by the app game, Monument Valley.

Spatial Dynamics: Egg Tool

This wooden game course is my interpretation of the Egg Tool project from Spatial Dynamics. The prompt was to create something that would:

1) pick up an egg,

2) crush the egg (preferably separating it from the shell)

3) and beat the egg.

I decided to add in a step 0) play with the egg. 

Pulling in elements from pool, croquet, and mini golf, I made a game board that the user could tilt and roll an egg around inside. Users were challenged to roll the egg through gates and up a ramp while avoiding corner holes.

The removable center triangle piece housed the rest of the steps. The bottom of the flag crushed the eggs through the holed bottom and the scooped flag made out of chiseled cherry would act as a spoon to beat the egg. The piece was finely sanded and waxed to protect the wood from egg fluids. I am particularly proud of my triangle, which references a billiard triangle and which I mitered my hand.

The egg tool game board came after a long process of brainstorming sketches.

What inspired me the most in the end was simple form explorations, which allowed me to consider other ways of moving the egg through a tool. 

The most significant thing I learned from this is not limit my ideas to the most "efficient" solution possible. While I do admire simple functionality dictating an elegant form, this was the first project I allowed myself to incorporate fun interactivity.

Spatial Dynamics: Nature Object Series

A lengthy compilation of a semester's worth of work in Spatial Dynamics--featuring: Corn!

At the beginning of the semester, we were all required to choose natural objects to study and explore. I chose a small Indian corn because I was drawn to its three distinct textures of the kernels, the cob, and leaf shell.

We began our journey with some research, brainstorming, and orthographic drawings.

These orthographic drawings then had to translate into clay. Here I am trying to figure out how to use the clay tools and wet/dryness of the clay to make both rounded and flaky forms. I used a subtractive method once I had my two base forms of a basic cylinder attached to a prism.

End result and hand for scale!

The next step was to create a piece by using cross sections of our object. I measured out aluminum sheets that I cut, grinded, drilled and sand blasted and positioned them on a wooden dowel standing upright. I did this to suggest the corn's original orientation growing in a corn stalk. It was a pleasant surprise to find my piece now embodied the whimsical quality of a cloud staircase.

Step three utilized skewers. We were assigned to create a structure inspired by/reflecting our object. I played around with string knots and tubing as fasteners to find a module shape, then branched from there. I was most satisfied with this hexagonal module, which I felt was sturdy enough and also round enough.

After fiddling around with staircasing connections, I came up with this abstracted corn cob.

My piece was rather large, so here's a video to better capture the structure.

The final exploration was much broader. We were asked to give our object "life" again by capturing something about its growing process and its connotations. Throughout the process, I gradually came to appreciate (and respect to a point) the systematic growth of corn, which became my focus of the last project. I compared the cob to a modular shelving unit, which I designed to be customizable so it could grow several directions. I continued the hexagonal structure.

My completed set. With the time I had, I was able to make three shelves in total, which is the abridged version of the story I wanted to tell. The wood is baltic birch plywood, sanded to be smooth to the touch. There are circular details made of dowels in drilled holes on the faces of the hexagon.

A possible base for stacking.

When stacked, the trapezoids form shelves, whose length depends on which side is flipped up or down.

The most important lesson I learned while making this was the value of jigs to make uniform and consistent parts. I also learned about using a table saw to make mitered cuts for my hexagon core.