Clay Purdy: Project 1 MakerCase Lamp

concept: My design was inspired by adobe architecture found in places like New Mexico but with a cosmic twist. I have family in Glorieta New Mexico so I go and visit pretty often and see a lot of adobe houses and I've recently become obsessed with a style genre I like to call "Cosmic Western". Cosmic Western is where the dusty, desert, old west motif meets with the colorful, magical and mysteriousness of the cosmos. So I knew I wanted to make some kind of old looking house that had somehow crossed over into the unknown. 

Process: The modeling process was pretty basic. I created frames for the large windows and the door using the rasters, and created a wood pattern using the vectors. For the steps I copy and pasted some of the wood pattern and stretched it out to fit the pieces. I wanted it to look rough like real adobe architecture, so I offset every element so that nothing was really even or symmetrical. I also put I giant crack in the back to act as portal or tear to another dimension. After the pieces were cut and assembled, I sanded down all the corners to round out the edges, like a real adobe house. After that, I sprayed the whole piece with textured spray paint and painted over that with acrylic paint. To finish up the exterior, I used ground cinnamon to create a weathered red dirt look, then applied a clear coat. I cut and stained 1/4" dowel rods to act as the roof beams. I cut parchment paper and glued it to the inside of the windows and cut up colored light gels and stuck them to contact paper to create the portal effect in the crack. I also sanded the stairs down to make them look worn. My main goal when modeling a project digitally then building it physically, is to make it look like it was not modeled digitally.

Materials: I used 1/4" MDF for the box, textured spray paint for the exterior texture, mixed acrylic paint for the color, and ground cinnamon for the weathering. For the interior I used parchment paper for the windows, colored light gels for the portal, and 1/4" dowel rods for the wooden beams.