IP Weekly Progress -- #22

What I’ve Done:

Sunday: (4 hours) Glue Ashwood strips, made ash rings

Monday: (4 hours) Glue Ashwood strips, wove strips of ash wood together, and replenished supplies

Tuesday: (8 hours) continued weaving ash wood strips together

Wednesday: (12 hours) Wooden armature construction until completely finished.

Thursday: (4 hours) Spilt ash wood and reglue/reattach parts and Materials gathered for lighting, cut out tissue paper to cover and DOPE. Quick sketching to plan out the bottom modules of the Jelly.

Quick Vocab:

Top module: The dome, or top of the Jellyfish

Bottom module: The body, or the inside of the Jellyfish that comes out from inside the dome

Tip module: The very end of the body, where it will hold a lot of thin strips of paper tendrils at the very, very end.

Process:

I finished the wooden armature, woohoo! Wednesday night I finished the very top and decided that I was going to go ahead and finish the other pieces. By Thursday morning I had finished the entire wooden frame. Next part is thinking about how I will attach the paper and the aesthetic of the “tail” portion. I also need to figure out how to hang this piece in a gallery setting let alone where inside Slusser/WORK.

What I’ve accomplished/discovered/ encountered:

I finished constructing the ash wood armature Thursday morning. I originally stayed up late just to finish the top portion, but I became super motivated just to finish the entire structure. I reallllly wanted to get it done and move on to the next step. I'm really estatic with finishing that part because now the most enjoyable portion of paperfolding comes next. Can't wait!

Right now, after building it the armature looks stiff and immobile, but the beauty of the ash wood is that it’s easy to influence and bend. With fishing line, I plan on bending and pulling the ash hoops so the hoops are no longer a circle, but a realistic organic shape. There are no perfect circles in a lifeform and in order to depict movement better, these hoops shapes will curve and curl inside so if there is a lit source tucked away then the inside will not be perfectly oriented. The light will be present inside the top and down the bottom will be thin enough that small LEDs will be present, but no major source of light will be located down there. The transluscent nature of the tissue paper will be lit naturally -- but I have to make sure there is enough light present inside the gallery space.

Next stage is as follows:

Wiring -- I have the materials, the batteries, the LEDs, the wire, etc. Now that I'm finished with building the structure I can place tissue paper so the LEDs can be placed physically anywhere on the Jellyfish. I wouldn't be forced to place it on the wooden armature, but even the floating space between each ash splint are an option. I probably won't encase the entire structure in tissue paper and just apply it where it needs the absolute most which is the very top portion since it handles a majority of the weight. The bottom modules require little tissue paper inside, but I will cut strips of it to seal the joints of ash wood that meet and strips to placed on top of the fishing line/wiring to prevent them from shifting around inside.

Little hard to read the writing, but on the right is sketches of bending the ash wood to make the sculpture look more organic for the Jellyfish body module. On the left side is how the wiring works. 4 D-cell batteries can provide energy for over 100 LEDS (I'm sure closer to 500) so that would be all the energy I would need! The wiring would be wrapped in strips of paper to bind the two wires (One for positive and negative flow) and combine them as one white line. There are 3 ways of exit points on the sculpture itself and that being 1) the very top of the Jelly, 2) the very end of the tendril trail where the collection of wires would be hidden in a tendril, and 3) slip out from underneath the top of the Jellyfish and mask it as a long and thin tendril.

Lights -- All set here -- now I just need to wire. Rodemer is helping me on Tuesday with this part. I hope to be all done with this portion by Wednesday.

Paper -- I have all the paper in my studio so I'm ready to go. The major thing is that I need to carefully plan how to attach and piece together the folds on the armature itself. There is a thin tissue paper to be wrapped over most of the top portion and some parts of the bottom two modules. Once that is settled, I will fold the final forms over For the top module this will come last. I have a pretty good idea of what I want to do from folding a lot this year, but now I to bring everything together as one. I'm capable and confident in my skills of making interesting paper pieces, but I need to carefully plan out the placement of some of these paper pieces should go. The bottom module (Body) holds the most interest since it's the longest and easiest to spot. The dome will be the center piece, but I feel that everyone will spend more time observing the body because of the high amount of detail and many kinds of paper folds will be present on it. The tendrils will start at the middle and collect (Like a cluster of tendrils as one) at the very end split again and I will let them fall naturally.

What I should do next:

Work 10 hours a day. Seriously. This weekend I am planning out the paper folding of the bottom modular portion before I move up top. I’ve focused a great time on the very top and now the very bottom needs major attention. It’s the most simple wooden portion and the paper portion for that section is not quite as planned out. Need to meet with Mark about where hang/how to provide an electrical outlet to light it up.