The second installment in a series of posts spotlighting some projects that I’ve done over the past few months. This time, I’ll be going into the process of creating in a bit more detail. Hopefully, you won’t be bored out of your mind! Enjoy!

Part 2: Design 2 Final Project

My final project for last term’s Design 2 course is definitely one of my favorite projects that I’ve produced during my experience at Art Center. It’s one of my favorites, in no small part, because of just how painful and arduous the entire process was.

Design 2 is a foundational course where we focus on basic two-dimensional principles of design and color theory, as well as the application of these principles to three-dimensional design. Our final assignment, which spanned a total of seven weeks, was to create an abstract three-dimensional form based on an organic object of our choice. I chose a pea pod.

For the first several weeks, we spent our time sketching and creating conceptual models out of paper and cardboard. We brought in about four or five models every week, which were critiqued vigorously by our notoriously hard-to-please instructor, Jon Nguyen. Week after week my designs were met with a somewhat lackluster response from Jon, along with the inevitable conclusion, “It’s not quite resolved. I think you can push it further.” And so, week after week, I kept pushing. Week after week, I built more models, and drew more sketches and concepts. I’ll admit, it was incredibly demoralizing to come into class week after week, only to leave feeling as if I had to start over again entirely (which is pretty much what happened, really). There were a couple things that made this project difficult. Firstly, it’s really hard to abstract something without losing the “essence” of what that thing happens to be. Secondly, I had pretty much zero experience with sculpture, which turned out to be much more difficult than I’d anticipated. Translating a 2D drawing into an interesting sculpture can be a frustrating experience to say the least.

A couple weeks before the project was due, I happened upon a general concept that Jon and I liked, and I began to explore the materials that I would use in the final version. I settled upon a combination of sheet acrylic, medium density fiberboard, and masonite. The week before the project was due, I came to class with a half scale model of my project, and showed it to Jon.

And he hated it.

I was pretty freaked out. Here I was, seven days from the due date, with essentially no design for my final. Thankfully, Jon gave me a few choice pieces of criticism which spurred my thinking in new directions. I set about sketching furiously, eventually creating a design that was more resolved and more graceful than what I’d shown him previously.

I set out to construct a dynamic, curving shape out of masonite and colored acrylic, measuring about 18 inches long. This shape would represent the curving contours of a pea pod. Emanating from the bowl of the curve would be a bunch of small box-like shapes. These would represent the idea of containment that is central to the nature of a pea pod. Creating a dynamic form like this out of sheets of masonite and acrylic proved incredibly complex. To make it happen, I translated my sketches into Adobe Illustrator, creating three different views of the object (first image, below). I created a side view, a top view including all of the box shapes, and a top view including the various colors of material I would be using. By carefully measuring these views, I created 38 separate templates (some of which you can see in the second image, below), from which the masonite, MDF and acrylic pieces were lasercut. The process of designing the three views, and the 38 templates probably took a total of 15 hours. Lasercutting the shapes only took about an hour and a half (May God bless the inventor of the laser cutter). Finally, the pieces were sandwiched together and adhered with epoxy resin.

To my great delight and surprise, the pieces fit together exactly as I’d designed (which was good, since I ended up having to get it all done the night before class…), and the finished product looked exactly as I’d imagined. I can’t tell you how rewarding it is to watch as something comes together as you’d hoped, after so many conceptual missteps and crappy models. I was happy.

And thankfully, so was Jon! He dug it! And I’m proud to say its currently sitting in the student gallery here at Art Center. It’s really gratifying to end up with an object that you’re proud of as the culmination of such an arduous, frustrating process. Makes it all worthwhile, most definitely.

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