- Notes from class
- Flower of Life
- Geometric construction drawings of geometric shapes
-Vesica Piscis
-Triangles
-Hexagons
- Geometric construction drawings of the five platonic solids
-Closed faces
-Opened faces
- Color illustrations of the five platonic solids
- The drawings for the templates 3D construction of the five solids
- The five 3D individual solids with closed faces colored
- The Platonic Nest
- Reflection
For about two months, this practice of using compass and ruler to draw and create designs and forms was very new to me. I really have never used compass to create designs before. I have always used drawing materials, such as pencils, charcoals, pens, and paints to create designs or drawings. However, in our space and materiality class, I was introduced to new materials and ways to create design structures that originated from nature. When our professor Jose introduced the flower of life and geometric construction drawings that derived from nature, the concepts approached me very interestingly. Despite my interest in this new learning, it was hard to completely understand the concepts since they weren’t familiar to me. However, as I learned more about the concepts in a deeper sense and practiced drawing geometric shapes and platonic solids, they became more interesting and familiar to me. Even though, at first, I felt little confined in a way that I was only using few materials, such as a compass, tracing paper, and cardboards, as I got more focused on and actually “mastered” the geometric construction drawings, these drawing practices became more exciting. Also, as I continuously learned different designs in nature, it was amazing that all five designs were connected in such ways. It didn’t feel logical to me at first, but as I learned the geometric designs step by step, I was able to understand how they all branched out from the flower of life.
For our final object, we made the Platonic Nest. As we started off this project, Jose taught us how to construct the templates for 3d construction of the five solids: octahedron, tetrahedron, hexahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. We first constructed the five solids with closed faces and colored them with each corresponding color. Then, we repeated this process to create the five solids with opened faces. It was confusing at first because I didn’t know what he meant by the “nest.” I failed multiple times to properly make the templates. The templates of the solids with opened faces were actually supposed to get bigger by half inch to be able to nest one another. But, I made the templates in the same sizes as the solids with closed faces. So the later order of solids couldn’t nest the earlier order of solids because they were in the same scale. After experiencing these failures, I adjusted the sizes of the later solids. Although I tried to be precise as much as possible with the increasing sizes of the templates, the last solid, dodecahedron template was a bit smaller to nest over icosahedron, which successfully nested the earlier three solids. To make this work, I used wires to hold two parts of dodecahedron closer. I spent few days to tighten them harder. When the two parts were close enough to connect, I glued them together to finalize the nest. In addition to this reflection of making the platonic nest, I also had hard time coloring and gluing each solid. I should color the templates first and glue them in an order of octahedron, tetrahedron, hexahedron, icosahedron, and dodecahedron. But, for several times, I messed up the order. I glued the solid first and color it or I colored it properly but glue it before nesting earlier solids inside. Despite these challenges, I spent many hours and days to complete the platonic nest properly. I was extremely proud and satisfied when I finished nesting the solids because of many hardships I faced in the process. If there weren’t many challenges during this process of nesting, I wouldn’t be this much proud and pleased about the completion of the platonic nest. Overall, learning geometry of nature was challenging and confusing in many ways, but it was significant and efficient to accomplish adopting the concepts and creating the drawings of geometric shapes and solids towards the end. I wish I would have a chance to utilize these lessons of creating geometric construction drawings and three dimensional platonic solids in other areas of my future art career.
