I’m continuing to develop a finalized idea, the plan right now is to have the sign/sculpture to appear to be moving. The theme of the piece is based off of pirates flags. I’m still trying to learn techniques that will allow me to bring my idea to life. It’s going to be large enough to be seen outside or to be hung up on a wall. It should look like A pirate flag or what would be on the pirate flag to be moving.
Materials
plywood, hot glue, EL wire, string lights, LED lights, wire, wire cutters, staples, black paint
Plan
week of 9/13: list of design ideas completed, begin to assemble materials
Week of 9/20: have an assortment of materials collected, testing the best lights to use
Week of 9/27: Full design finalized, begin full scale building if not already started
Last week of term: Full project competition
I hope you got some inspiring ideas during class! There’s definitely a lot of ways you can make your concept a little more complex and challenging. I really like the skull design you made with the tentacles. Making the tentacles wiggle and the eyes blink could a cool but relatively simple animation. It might be worth it to buy the electrical/lighting equipment as soon as possible so you can begin experimenting what you can do.
This has a lot of potential with the ideas that were thrown out in class yesterday. I agree with Darius that the skull/tentacles could be really cool if the tentacles have movement. It could be something as simple as 2 frames that flash back and forth. If you decide to use el wire for your lighting with a plywood base, you could look into using a staple gun for fastening the lights to it. They make staples for wires so Id imagine that they wouldn’t damage the el wire.
I agree with the comments above, I really hope you feel more confident after Monday’s class. I was in a similar position last year where I couldn’t come up with an idea for class, and after talking it out with the class I had a much better idea of what I wanted to do. In terms of what we discussed in class, I really like the idea of a few edge lit acrylic pieces with etchings in them layered together. Here is an example link: https://www.pinterest.ch/pin/516084438531088511/
I like the medusa looking skull or the skull with fire-like spikes coming out of its head, both would be neat if you tried to incorporate the “animation” half of it as well, making the flames change positions or the tentacles on the three eyed head. You could also make some or all of the eyes blink!
I think you’re on a good path, and hope our discussion in class helped out! All of us are here to help if you want it.
If you take the EL wire/LED path, an important thing to note is that you can save a lot of resources (and construction time) by focusing on large, line-only shapes. If you have intricate details and filled-in shapes, you will wind up using more of your lights in a small area – this is fine and create some great effects, but keep an eye on how much you’re using! Etched acrylic doesn’t have this problem so much, since the number of lights you use doesn’t have to change as you add/remove detail to the image.
Regardless of the material you use, if you’re animating, make sure you draw out the frames of your animation beforehand. You can use something like Brush Ninja (https://brush.ninja/) to just get a quick sense of how the whole animation will look. If you can, it’d be cool to have a couple different motions going on to add visual interest – for example, if you choose the skull with tentacles you could have both the tentacles and eyes moving back and forth.