Continuing from last week’s blog, where we agreed on a final design, our next step was to work together to create 3 A1 panels. Although out design is quite simple in its form, with four people working on drawings, we thought it could be quite difficult to for everyone to be working from an image in our minds. We though the best and easiest way to overcome this and to produce the drawings fastest would be to construct a scaled model that everyone could use as a reference. We began by drawing the shape the poles would follow onto a base, which can be seen below.
After this, we began to construct the poles which were made from dowel of varying sizes at the scale of 1:20. The different diameters of the dowel represented different materials, for example, the thickest dowel would by the concrete pylons and the thinnest dowel would be the metal structures which represent the city. The poles would all be at varying lengths to represent the organic natural form of a mangrove. We measured and cut the dowel and used a saw to cut them to length, then sanded the ends to make them smooth which can be seen below.
Once the dowel was cut to size, we tested the structure by gluing one of the lengths of dowel to the base using Tarzan’s Grip Glue which can be seen below.
This test was successful and the dowel stood soundly. From there we began to glue the rest of the dowel to the base, following the guide line. There was no real plan to where each would go, only that there had to be clusters in certain places to block and create the views along the path. The pictures below show the final stages of our model construction.
From this stage, we had a group meeting to discuss who would do what, according to our strengths and weaknesses. We planned to hand draw, the use Photoshop to create renders and use photographs to create the perspective views. This proved more difficult than originally thought, because of the lack of access to the site, we were limited to what pictures we could find online and what pictures we could take from the edges of the site. After we found these pictures, from the initial drawing stage to the final panels, we did really encounter any major problems aside from the perspectives. Everyone worked well together and helped each other when another person was struggling. We used InDesign to create our panels and decided to use a representation of the Brisbane River running along them to connect them as a set.
After some image quality issues that arose when printing were solved, we were able to mount our panels onto foam core in preparing for our exhibition. The images below are JPEG’s of our final panels.
In the lecture, Yasu and the tutors introduced the theme groups to us in preparation for next week’s tutorial where we begin to work with our chosen theme group. A number of the topics are very closely related to our folie design which would make the transition between projects a lot easier. The ones that interested me most because of this were the diagramming, nature and human body themed groups.
