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3D sketches
Our first design assignment in Furniture Design class is taken from Elements of Design: Rowena Reed Kostellow and the Structure of Visual Relationships
, by Gail Greet Hannah. The book discusses the life of Rowena Reed Kostellow, who taught industrial design at Pratt Institute for more than 30 years.
Ms. Kostellow's belief was that three-dimensional designs should be sketched three-dimensionally, not two-dimensionally. The tools of her studios were, therefore, clay, cardboard, wire, glue, and so forth, not paper, pencils, and markers.
Our first exercise, adapted from this book, was to create 25 small sculptural compositions of three volumes each, using Sculpey or another modeling material. The parameters of the assignment were:
- Each volume must be linear, not curvilinear.
- Each volume must be different from all the others used in the exercise.
- One of the volumes in each composition must be "dominant," one "subdominant," and one "subordinate." The dominant volume must be the most prominent and have axial movement. The subdominant volume must respond to the dominant volume and complement it. The subordinate volume must complete the idea.
- Each composition must incorporate one of three joints: "cradling" (a rabbet joint), "wedging" (one piece fits into another in a non-joint way), or "piercing" (one volume pierces another).
- Each composition must convey one of a given list of 25 emotions, for example anxiety, playful, strong, trusting, confused, victorious, and so forth.
This exercise was annoying at first because I couldn't easily connect the little Sculpey shapes with the emotions we had to depict. How can one convey "patience" with three little shapes of clay? So I simply sat down to work and let the compositions happen and, interestingly, they began to acquire emotional qualities. I had trouble making my volumes completely linear - the soft Sculpey tended to move and bend as I tried to form it, taking on curvilinearity. Some of my earlier attempts had to be re-done and some of the compositions don't adequately describe the emotion I assigned to them.
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Click
here to see all my little compositions
2 Comments
You should post them without the text so that we can tell you how they make us feel!
That would have been a good test of whether I succeeded in the assignment! Maybe the next assignment will be similar, but with curves, and I can try that.
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