Group Assignment 1: Furniture Design Progress

After consulting with Miss Lisa in our first group tutorial and telling her about our change of plans, she said it was okay and we were advised to use silicone glue to put our umbrella stand together. Last saturday, we went to Ace Hardware at Ikano Power Centre to buy some supplies (such as silicone glue, spray paint and bits of plastic pipes for our steampunk-styled decorations) before heading over to my house to build it.

My house has been renovated recently, so there were a lot of spare parts lying around that we could use for our project.

Figuring out how to put it all together. That's what I call improvising, heh.

We found old table legs and CD racks to use for the umbrella stand!

Cleaning the parts before painting, to make sure we don't paint over dirt.

We dismantled the CD rack and started spray painting it red, and the table legs gold. Our inspiration was Iron Man, with a steampunk twist.

We have to wait one day for the paint to fully dry. I'm glad we bought the spray paint. It really gives a finished look to everything.

After this, all that was left was to glue it together using silicone glue, and decorate it! Silicone glue is really strong. It's the glue used to piece together the glass of an aquarium!

Our progress so far. 

Extra: Steampunk Iron Man.

Look, it's CapFe's muse for our furniture assignment!

[source]

Okay, back to work. Today we're going to meet up at Ikano Power Centre to buy some supplies at the hardware store, and then go back to my house to put it all together. Some assembly required.

Group Assignment 1: Change of plans.

After some reconsideration, we decided not to use the TV to make our TV bookshelf and instead opted for our backup plan, the umbrella stand.

Here's a picture of the big ol' TV that we were going to use:

Some reasons why we didn't use the TV:

- Hazardous. In order for our TV bookshelf to work. we would have to break the glass of the screen and use the inside of it to place planks as shelves. While in theory, breaking the glass seems easy, practically it is a difficult process. None of us are experienced in breaking glass before and we don't have the right safety equipment, such as goggles.

- Time and cost inefficient. Given the timeframe of the project, it would simply take too much unnecessary time and effort to break the glass. Cleaning up the broken glass pieces would take a long time too.

In theory it looked nice. Credits to Zue for the photo.

A lesson learnt: just because it may look nice in theory, doesn't mean it will work well practically!

Group Assignment 1: Furniture Design

I'm more inclined to graphics design and multimedia, so I never thought I'd have to be designing and building furniture one day! Heh.

In the lecture, Miss Lisa showed us examples of furniture using old and discarded items. It was really inspiring to see all the things one could make just from things lying about! Just goes to show that not everything needs to be bought from a store, if you have a little creativity.

This assignment was fairly interesting, since we had to split into groups of 6 to design and build a piece of working furniture. I volunteered to be team leader, with my teammates Lisa, Zue, Priya, Li Wei and K. For our presentation on that day, we had to pick a piece of furniture and think up of the concept and methods to create it by using recycled and repurposed materials.

We decided to make use of a big ol' TV that my grandmother wanted to throw out, and turn it into a multi-purpose bookshelf! It'll be a bookshelf, among many other things.

Our backup plan was to make an umbrella holder using egg cartons and pipes.

The specs.

Some rough sketches I did.

That's Priya taking a photo of Zue's writing, and me in the background writing things in my notebook.

Me again.

The final product has to be completed in about 3 weeks. Hopefully we'll make it in time!

Individual Assignment 1: Self Portrait

Hello and welcome! This is my first post on this blog.

Today in our first proper lecture given by Miss Lisa, we were given an overview of the elements of design and a few principles of visual aesthetics. She then showed us a few popular western art movements, such as Romanticism, Impressionism, Pop Art and even Graffiti (I was personally surprised that it's considered an art movement, since it's still so new!).

Which led us to our first assignment: "Design a self portrait based on an art movement that you feel represents you best". In about one and a half hours, we had to come up with an A3 sized portrait of ourselves using the things around us, and as Miss Lisa says, "free stuff".

The style I chose to best represent myself was Constructivism. It is an art movement that started in Russia in 1919 that mainly used on propaganda posters in the war. I like this style because it's simple and bold, yet elegant. I also like the use of minimal colours in this movement, since I consider myself to be a bit of a minimalist too.

Some examples of Constructivism:

Some preliminary sketches I made:

And the final portrait:

I decided to use the sketch in the lower right corner. The final image is a portrait of me in profile view. The methods I used are drawing, gluing, and a bit of collage (the white flower was paster on). I tried to be different and didn't use flowers or leaves picked from the campus like most of my classmates did, instead I borrowed my friends markers to colour it in. I tried to emulate Russian writing by using blocky letters and writing the letter "N" in my name reversed. I chose a yellow background because it represented my outlook on life, which is mostly positive. The flower pasted on my head there also symbolizes a form of happiness. My shirt in the portrait is light blue simply because it's my favourite colour, and in the bottom right corner I wrote "Foundation in Design", because that is basically what represents me now; a student studying Foundation in Design at Taylor's Lakeside.

In our presentation, we were also asked to state why we were studying design. My answer was because I was always interested in design after being exposed to it ever since I was small thanks to my dad (he was an architect, who then became a designer!), and I wanted to pursue something that I truly liked.

Well there you have it, my first assignment. Here's to more posts in the future! :]