Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Final Design Project

This Blog template doesn't seem to like this widescreen video, so you may have to open up
the video in a separate youtube page to see the whole thing.

As with a lot of art projects, this one took a lot of twists and turns.

My first idea was to create a cat head that would move back and forth and nudge the viewer the way that cats do. I love it when they do that.

Dave pushed me to be more abstract. He just wanted to see a moving furball. He suggested I use the same material I used to cover my strainer for the covering project. Works for me, I thought, free materials are the best.

I spent hours making up gears, rods, belts, etc. creating a contraption that would make an outer, furry, skin move. Once the insides were finished, I covered them with a black plastic trash bag so I could then cover that in the vacuum lint. The only problem was that the rods didn't want to stay vertical and kept running into the gears. The bag would also get caught in the gears. Some of the gears didn't even want to move with the bag wrapped around them, there seemed to be too much stress.

This is when I had to move to a less organic shape and make a more square, almost bed-canopy like structure. This worked much better and even held up once I applied the fur.

Sigh. Relief.

Also, by the time I was done with everything, I was tired of explaining to everyone that this was an abstract cat, and decided it would make more sense to just call it a dust bunny.

4 comments:

  1. WOW! A giant breathing dust bunny!!! Something your Mom would NEVER have in her house! LOL Great thing to see the final project after seeing just the gears you made from cardboard boxes! Very creative!

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  2. Well I don't know where I am going to keep it unless I just throw it away, which I probably will. My teacher didn't like that idea though.

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  3. Christine, those dust bunnies came from 2 houses in Hockessin (TeHeHe). BTW, Adam's Mom has a giant cardboard lemon wedge in her house already and it is highly unlikely that she will accept a dust bunny since she has allergies. Perhaps Adam can have this piece of art work stored at his Dad's house.

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  4. Honestly I'll probably just throw it away.

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