Welding Metals, and my Final Product
Greetings and salutations!
Technically it's already D-Day for the WSP (Wearable Sculpture Project), but I still haven't figured out how to export/share videos from Final Cut Pro yet. The Publish option is greyed out even though I've tried a slew of solutions including signing into an Apple account (and waking my brother up in the process).
Anyway. I'd just like to upload a shitload of pictures, showing my progress in the last week. It's been a LOT.
These are all my material experiments. Well, not all, I took some and transformed them into an actual prototype. But here's what I did as a warm up, trying to get used to welding:
The background looks classy as f*ck but it's actually just leftover polyfoam.
And here are my actual prototypes:
The only difference between a prototype and a material exploration is, I added a ring on each prototype. Sorry some of these pictures are really dark, it was nearly midnight when I finally got around to photographing them.
And here is the final product I chose:
Since I'm not very photogenic, I equipped the help of my all-time bestest-old-childhood-ish-friend Globin to model the final product! Kudos to Globin for putting up with me for three hours to get this right! Seriously. Shower that mothafucka with kudos. Buy it by the ton and dump her house with it. Kudo bells, kudo bells, kudos all the waaaay...
Right. Ahem.
I asked a few people as to which design depicted Anger best. All of them answered this one, because the nails give it a very "aggressive" impression. It also displays texture, rhythm, and unity very well.
Overall, I think this may be my favourite assignment of the term. It doesn't even feel like an assignment, it feels like a personal project that you take in your spare time, feeding the soul and all that crap. I got to go deeper on topics that already interest me, and learn many new ones. This was the first time I tried anything like soldering and welding. I think they're good techniques that not everyone has, and it's not something you can take a class for---I had to go to blacksmith shops by the main street and ask one of them to teach me. It's not a formal (or normal) request, but they took me in! At first the guy had to hold the pliers for me, but after I purchased a welding machine for home use, I learned how to simulatenously hold the pliers and weld. On a personal level, it got me closer to some people in my life---an old alumni who's now taking Product Design suggested the aluminium sheets. One of my art teachers got me interested in welding. And of course, my father, who took me to countless trips to go scrap-hunting, welding-machine-hunting, Epoxy-hunting, and part-time cameraman! (You'll see the fruits of his struggles soon enough.) I learned how to control my temper when a material does not go the way I want it to, which that alone is already an achievement.
I feel like this was a very personal project, because it helped me grow as an artist and a person. That sounds cheesy af, so I'm going to stop now, but overall overall, I really enjoyed exploring and discovering new things, and I hope (if you keep up with my blog regularly) you did too!