Wearable Sculpture
In this project, we were to make a sculpture of some sort that could be worn as a hat.
To start off with, we brainstormed. I knew that I wanted to incorporate my "style" into it somehow, so I sketched out a few ideas. The one that appealed to me the most had to do with a sort of top hat that had faces all over it, so that was the one that I went with. I began by making the facial features; initially, I planned to have several faces, so I made a bunch of teeth out of newspaper wrapped in tape. After that, I made the mouth (also with newspaper and tape) and then the eyes (also ALSO with newspaper and tape). Once this was done, I began the actual hat-making. I knew that I wanted to make the hat part myself, so I used cardboard and (you guessed it!) tape. I made the base first, cutting out a circle of cardboard, and then cutting another circle within that for the head to go. I then used something similar to card stock for the big cylindrical part. After I fit this into the base, I hot glued it all together, added the top circle, and thus the armature for the hat was done. After this, I used a knife to cut out a spot for the mouth (since I knew I wanted the mouth to go inwards, adding some dimension) and covered the whole hat with the fabric that I had.
I don't think I thought this part through well enough, because once the fabric was on, it made it difficult to see where the hole for the mouth was. After an agonizing amount of time (during which I used a knife in a likely unsafe manner), I was able to cut the fabric out from in front of the hole for the mouth. After this, it was pretty smooth sailing: I put fabric on the mouth, put in some teeth, and fit it into the hole, adding hot glue on the inside to keep it stable. The eyes were made out of fabric and hot glued on as well, and as a final touch, I decided to add a bow around the bottom, since there was a lot of empty space and I wanted to make use of it.
Overall, this project was pretty fun. I was able to use my sort of art style in it, and I also got to try out a medium which I was unfamiliar with—I've never made a hat before, so that's something. If anything, I wish I had found some alternative to hot glue, since the strings of it stand out and stuck to the black fabric, which annoying me. I also wish that I had somehow found a way to add more faces, which I ended up being unable to do due to lack of space—if all of the mouths were going to go inward, the inside of the hat would fill up, and there'd be no room for the head. I suppose I could have used that to my advantage, though; I based the hat size off of my own head, and since it's apparently a big one, the head tends to be too big for some of the people I tried to make wear it. Overall, however, I'm pretty pleased with the outcome, and glad that I got to do something that I normally wouldn't even consider.