Category Archives: Year 3

This is the parent category of all courses taken in year 3.

Demo A: Sculpting with Clay

Posted on by

after painting with acrylic paint, i added details in colored pencil and ballpoint pen

Demo A: Carving

Posted on by

Edit 10/1: I added some more details; a wooden dowel for the stem & I replaced the armature supporting the head with a dowel as well. I also cut out some felt details and attached them with hot glue, and instead of making arms I finished this off with a cape. 

Original 9/30:

I left this guy armless because I was running out of felting time ^^;;

In order to attach all the pieces to each other i used armature wire & spray adhesive for a stronger bond. For the legs (and the worm) I also felted into the base (after they were glued) to make the pieces slightly more cohesive.

 

I originally was going to use styrofoam, but it was difficult to carve without being fairly careful & I didn’t trust its resilience. I also opted not to use floral foam because it isn’t feltable (at least not easily?) and I felt like it was breakable. I ended up using polyethylene foam which was a nice surface to felt into– the final product is a sculpture that is soft to the touch but not posable.

Soft Sculpture Demo A/B

Posted on by

This week I decided to sew a little guy! I have really basic sewing experience but this was my first time working from a pattern/making a plush and it was about as difficult as I anticipated, but overall I’m happy with the result!

scrapped body

 

The pattern I created initially included a body;  to come up with the basic shape I referenced a stuffed toy that I have and worked backward. I ended up scrapping the body as the other pieces came together because I thought the final result would look cuter if the limbs came directly from the star.

 

Most of this project was machine sewn, but the hand sewing part certainly took the longest. (…along with turning the arms and legs inside out…) Becuase I edited my design as I went, I didn’t plan ahead in adding the gusset or limbs before closing up the edges of my star. Sewing those pieces and making sure that everything was going to fit in the end was a little daunting, and as you can probably tell the gusset was a.) sewn in wrong  and b.) not the right size.

Pop-Up Demo A

Posted on by

 

For this week I chose to experiment with pop-up mechanics and I had so much fun! I love working with paper so I was really excited to jump into this project, but of course actually making something that A.) looks nice and B.) actually closes was a little bit easier said than done. My process was mostly guided by trial and error, including my work on the final, and instead of working from a sketch I just tested my ideas on a different sheet of paper as I worked through what components I wanted to display in my pop-up.

The biggest difficulty I had (which I’m sure was the same for most) was making sure that my parts weren’t inhibiting eachothers’ movement, and a lot of it had to do with which direction I was having pieces fold. I definitely had to compromise parts of my scene because they were folding into each other. The trial and error process was often frustrating, especially because I was working as I went (obviously not ideal); I ended up having to cut parts of my base in order to fit the foreground in.

 

 

Blender Demo C

Posted on by

yayyyy

the artwork i used for my planes:

some windows and doors
original illustration

 

For this demo I focused on the relationship between my planes and the camera– I really love the effect that adjusting the depth of field gives but my initial set up wasn’t giving me as dramatic of an effect as I wanted.  After figuring out that I had to change the render engine to see a change in the dof, I played around with the distance between each plane, the distance from the camera, and the aperture.

initial plane set-up
adjusted planes for dof

knife tool

My next point of experimentation was to adjust the topography of my planes… I only happened upon the knife tool when I was trying to figure out how/if I could cut a plane into two (still unsure how to do that, but I’m sure that I can!) I decided to put some folds in this plane to make it more grass like, but it’s not very noticeable in the final render.

The final step was to animate the camera zooming (and panning slightly) to show that my planes exist in a 3D space. I used the auto-keying feature for this which made the process indcredibly simple.

animating the camera

My first hour or so in blender was pretty rough (most of it spent really desperately trying to get my shadows to work) but after a couple of youtube tutorials I’m really excited to work more in this program. This tiny taste was a lot of fun :o)