3D Design

Final Reflection

My work illustrates my strengths and weaknesses as a learner as I worked my way through figuring out how to work with wire, clay, alginate, and paper. I learned to balance wire bees and a flower without falling, I learned how to balance the paper in my paper sculpture, as well as learned how to use an alginate mold.

My work shows that I improved because of the amount of detail I used compared to the beginning of the semester and the end. For instance, as shown at the beginning of my 3D art portfolio, I didn’t add as much detail as I had started to persevere towards the end of the year. For example, my last four or five works of art show more intricately designed ideas and possibly more interest in putting effort into them, probably because my last three were my sustained investigations. For instance, I used a multitude of materials, consisting of clay, plants, alginate, wire, and origami. 

The most challenging projects I created were the paper sculpture as well as the wire sculpture. For both of these projects, I had to work with the fact that I had to balance the paper on top of each other as well as balance the weight of the bees attached to the flower. This was challenging because of the risk of the wire sculpture collapsing because of the weight of the flower and bees, so I counterbalanced this with the strong aluminum wire spiral base. The paper sculpture was also challenging because the paper rolls would collapse if the weight on either side wasn’t even.

The project that I'm most proud of is my SI #2, Two Honey Bees, which I created with wire. This is because it took me many more hours than any other 3D project I made. The process for this SI began with constructing two wirebees. I made the bee wings by twisting the thinner copper wire around the aluminum wire into an ovalish/circle-ish spiral. I attached these to the thicker aluminum wire spiral bee body. I then worked on the sunflower by making a spiral and twisting the copper wire multiple times over the aluminum to represent the middle of the flower or disc florets. After this, I added the petals and used the pliers to bend the petals around the outer ring of the sunflower middle. My next step in the project consisted of making a stable enough base to convey a hill, in which I twisted the wire many times. Once I did this, I attached the bees to the petals to finalize the SI. As I did this project, I tried to add as much detail as I could to make the flower realistic as well as the bees. I’m most proud of this project because of the amount of detail I used and how real the SI looked compared to my sketches and thought process of it.

My artistic goal for the summer/future is to make art on a more regular basis. Recently, I feel as though I’ve only made art when I’ve had an art assignment. Although, when I’ll have more free time on my hands during the summer, I’ll try to make some time to make art.