Klarissa Austin Week 10: Cardboard Ball

Concept:

When the assignment was first touched upon at the beginning of the semester, I had just come across the work of the artist Anya Boz and her art dolls. Inspired by the craftsmanship and the expressiveness in the furry figures, I had intended to make a mask that incorporated some natural-colored fur I had gotten from work.

When the project was then actually assigned, I revisited this idea. At first I intended to go with the original plan -- a fox mask with the fur behind it, which would cover the head. But as I looked up references I started finding kitsune masks -- masks which were often stylized representations of foxes, typically white with red and black simple patterns.

Kitsune Masks

From there, I ended up making a character within my head, and added detail and personality to the idea. Details included were: fur, beads, ribbons, and flowers, primarily. 

The original concept sketch

Technique:

I pulled a low-poly fox model from the model bank and cropped it down to just the head. In Maya, I made changes in order to make it work better as a mask, as well as changing it up for stylistic purposes. Among the changes was the replacement of solid sections of the model with eye holes. I then took the model into Pepakura, and made the flat cut outs -- the main issue I ran into here, was that where I had cut the model in Maya, it did not register as part of the same piece in Pepakura, despite me going back and making sure everything was melded together properly. Therefore, when I took the cut outs into Rhino to process, I added in flaps along the center line and around the eye holes. 

The Pepakura cut layout -- the red lines are the places where I had merged geometry

Materials:

The mask itself is made out of eflute cardboard, which was laser cut down in the machine shop. I then bought fake white fur and glued that onto the back -- intended to cover the head when the mask was worn. The 'chopsticks', flowers, ribbon, and beads were all scrapped due to a lack of time. Assembly took longer than anticipated, and even the painted markings were lost to a lack of time and poor time management of what time I did have.

The finished mask on a messy workspace.