Paris Lopez: Week 4 Project 2 Serial Sliced Frog Sculpture

 

        Concept: I wanted to make something dynamic to capture one's attention. I also wanted to make sure the sculpture had a proper wide base so it wouldn't have issues staying up, so I thought about an animal  going into some splashing water to have a playful, dynamic image.I thought about different things and animals I'd like to model and sculpt, one of my first ideas was a polar bear. I thought about the icecaps melting and figured I could make something meaningful, yet when sketching out ideas after looking at polar bear reference I did not like any of it since bears to me could only have a limited amount of poses and most seemed static to me. So I ended up coming up with a frog jumping into a lake and the viewer only seeing the legs, as water splashes around them.

    Techniques: Modeling this was tough and consisted of a lot of trial and error. At fist I needed to keep the shape of the water as close to the concept, so I decided to draw it out from the top view with the _curve, _ellipse, _InsertKnot,and _InsertKink commands. The first one is the free-form curve drawing tool since it gave me a lot of freedom to edit part of the ellipses I did. I added knots and kink to manipulate the shape the the latter commands. Split was used countless times, even at the end once the sculpture had been laid out to for cutting, since there were some messy edges. I used extrude many, many times to create surfaces and solids. I played around with _CreateSolid to make some of the water, to varying success. I used several boolean types to get the difference between shapes and to merge shapes. Many of these were solid spheres to for bubbles to add thickness to the legs.

        Materials: I  highly modified various wooden materials to get close to what I wanted. I knew I wanted a glossy look for the "mud" brown parts, so I played with the reflective qualities. For all materials I changed the colors  several times to get to a place I liked visually. The pattern was something that came out from the Keyshot phase once it was clear a simple set of solid green legs would be boring. The brown mud/water was used for contrast, since the rest of the sculpture pops because of it. I used MDF for the sculpture and I spray painted most pieces with the colors from the renders. Some were only sprayed with gloss since the wood texture was interesting and the color was different. I used acrylic paint to splash some out and getting finite details. Some chalk was used to give it a bit of texture and color variety.  I glued perhaps half the pieces with Loctite due to the sheer amount of small pieces.