So... we just finished another of our five week courses, this one was called 'illuminated structures'. i could easily guess why i was placed there (this time wasn't a sign up, but the courses are chosen for us based on what we displayed during the time of our interview when we first joined the school), reason being that during my interview i had displayed a doll made from a tetra pack, with string, a straw and a pencil - no glue was used as per the rules.
i named her Kreide - this is what she looks like!
So, the tetra pack is her body, pinched in the middle to give her a waist. the head is just a small ball of wool and the hair i braided using embroidery thread. after i put it on the ball of wool, i stitched it down using a pink embroidery thread so it looked like it was some sort of hairband.
The belt around her waist is a braid made by using 'doug's braid'. it's a seven loop braid and kind of hard to make since you can't really take a break in between and it takes time. but it's fun to do and worth the effort in my opinion.
the hands i made i breaking a pencil and then wrapping it with wool after making holes in the appropriate places in the tetra pack. the dress too was made by using embroidery thread simply wrapped around. honestly speaking, i didn't think it would stay. i had my doubts.
The second reason was that i had made 'pinhole' drawings not originals of course - based on anime characters with the help of a print out and they loved it!
This is what they look like when lit up!
This one is from a series called 'Ah! my Goddess' and from the one on the extreme right is Urd, in the center is Belldandy and i kinda forgot the left most one's name....
This one's from an anime called Inuyasha - the one at the bottom is Kagome and at the top, holding the sword is Inuyasha.
This girl is from an anime called card captor sakura (i liked the manga and the movies more though... they were so... touching :') ) and obviously, the girl holding the staff is sakura and if you can identify a tiny creature waving from her right shoulder, that's kero.
Those were probably the two reasons as to why i was placed there and i was pretty excited as well!
of course, i didn't expect that we'd make products of anything, but i was definitely looking forward to what sort of explorations we'd do related to light.
our first assignment was to draw structures and identify how they were put together - through welding or screws and so on... the point was to understand how structures are made and with that understanding probably use it to make something. i wasn't that far from the truth... but it also made me learn a few other things.
Yes, it's kind of obvious that making a product is not as easy as you think... but, the amount of forethought that tends to go into it is rather amazing when you try to figure out how and why things were put together the way they were, the number of failures they must have gone through before they found the perfect design... how they thought about the ergonomics (an applied science concerned with designing and arranging things people use so that the people and things interact most efficiently and safely) and as a result might have compromised on the aesthetics to a certain extent.
The next assignment was similar to the first... we had to figure out how things were put together and then 'check' if we were right.
this was the drawing i made by guessing what must have been inside the boombox.
there were time when i wanted to open certain parts because it was only then that i realized that though i had used this product often enough, i knew next to nothing about what might be its contents...
and at that point i realized that very few of us understand and actually 'see' like the avatar 'i see you' see products for what they are and their value.
considering that we use some products very often, do you not find it strange?
and so, i reached a point where i could finally... dismantle it and all my assumptions about not understanding the product came true.
And so i felt kind of silly by the end of the assignment, but definitely gained more respect for those who designed these products, i suddenly realized how hard it might be to make a beautiful finished product.
After this, we were then asked to draw out the 'floor plan' of the second floor of our college. Sounds simpler than it seems... you see, most structures would try to go with a conventional design that is easy to see on a floor plan, however, in our college, part of the walls start extending outwards, this meant that some of the pillars or beams had been displaced on that side.
Which as we began to draw out confused us and made little to no sense.
This was the brief sketch i made at first for the basic layout plan... it looks very unstable... however, once drawn in scale, it looked... normal, relatively.
in this drawing, we were expected to place furniture, the brick partitions as well as the actual layout. And so i did...
After the struggles of making this, we were then expected to draw out the structures of 'organic' structures. Sounds nice and fun like a biology class i guess... however, we were expected to draw what we thought was the skeleton of the tree or plant was in straight lines and then over it place an ohp sheet and draw out the actual tree or plant as we see it.
This was far easier than when we were trying to draw the layout of our school since we could see the entire tree as well as a closeup. the hard part was trying to figure out whether or not you wanted to split a curve into two lines or make it a single line as well as how accurate you wished to be.
Anyway... after having my pride cut down, we were asked to make 'something', literally anything from mount board, masking tape, twine and a coconut broom. This was given to us after we were asked to look up some architects and designers and i was quite inspired by Antoni Gaudi as well as Frank Llyod Wright's 'Falling water' and was thinking of making a 'building'.
This was my initial design, since i wasn't exactly sure what i wanted to do.
i openly admit that i had absolutely NO idea what i was trying to achieve or what i was trying to draw... so let's not go there at all.
what i started doing and what i ended up making... well, i'm not sure how that happened either.
So i started by making the 'dome' that would be mostly made of glass or something which would be right at the top. the technique i used was similar to basketry, except instead of using bamboo slivers OR cane, i used the coconut leaf broom's sticks.
After i looked at this, i realized that it wouldn't stand on it's own or hold it's shape unless held i place as seen on the right. but this meant that i couldn't use it as a dome for the top of the building... also, the more i thought about it, the more i realized that as a staff top it would look far better.
so... i attached the stem of the staff. but because of the height, it felt off mostly because the top wasn't big enough or flashy enough to off set the size of the length of the staff and make it look normal. in the end, it looked something like this -
it looked quite nice as it was, but of course i still wanted to improve it, so i gave it a coat of paint...
And it looks like this!
A little after this, we decided to explore 'lights' and how to light things...
This was created by using a white LED torch on two sheets of glaze paper - one red and one yellow. the closer the torch is to the color, the more vividly it shows.
In this case, i wrapped a chart paper around the camera lens and took a photo of the LED torch from above, to see how much light would be shown and how well it would capture it.
This one was simply crumpled glaze paper, under which i placed the LED torch to see how much i could crumple it and as you'll see in the next image how the glow of the light could change because of that.
this was a small object i made, wanting to see or know how the light would reflect off of surfaces especially if i would make a lamp a little later.
Now we had reach the third week and had to decide and design what we would make. The first decision we had to make was whether or not we wanted to make something that was utilitarian. the more i thought about it, the less appealing making something utilitarian sounded. so instead, i decided to make something that was not utilitarian while at the same time having a back up plan in case what i wished to do wasn't possible.
my backup plan was making a statue from shattered glass - something along the lines of making an ohp sheet base to work on and making it almost like a cubist product.
i admit that it looks kind of silly and quite childish, but i love anime things, so i guess i wanted something like an 'anime girl' for my statue... though i wasn't a 100% sure how it would turn out, but sure that it would work.
my actual product that i decided to design though, was a staff. i've always wanted one so i decided to make one.
When i first tried to design my staff, i found myself leaning towards the conventional designs that most staffs have, till i realized that i just needed to look for inspiration.
my inspiration became more defined as i tried to understand what i was looking for. as i drew these designs, the things in my mind were - wings, buds or flowers, trees and patterns created by creepers or vines.
This design came from a little bit of inspiration from an anime called Tsubasa Chronicles (Chronicle of the wing)
this was my inspiration and what helped fix my final design:
The final design ended up looking like this:
Once i got a green sign for it, i began to discus materials...
At first i thought i would make the stem of the staff using metal and give it a coat of papier mache so as to give it a 'woody feel', make the orb of the staff with wire and cover it with plastic. the wings on top were to be made with either ohp or acrylic sheets and at the bottom a similar setup was to be made.
however, it was pointed out by my facilitators that i could use bamboo since that could be bent using something called 'heat treatment' you use the same method when you wish to bend metal pipes as well.
And So... making a teeny weeny prototype began. while making this prototype, i thought 'What if one could put lights in it and have switches? This meant that i'd need to carve 2 holes into the bamboo and insert all my wiring on the inside, which was a nice idea, i just wasn't sure how well it would go.
For my teeny weeny prototype (i'm going to start calling it proto now) i decided to make the ball from wire. While wire manipulation is a bit hard, i somehow managed to get it to resemble a ball of some sort, but then as i tried to cover it either from the inside or the outside, neither seemed to work.
Assuming that it was just the plastic that was not as mold-able as clay, i gave up. I tried a different attempt with paper by trying to make a paper ball, but even that didn't seem to work since the effect i wanted and the effect i got were completely different, i kept it as a back burner option.
After i made several realizations - from how am going to connect my top to my bottom, to how do i cover my orb? - i kept them in mind as i chose my materials.
While we had a second round of material session discussions, one of my facilitators said "You could wrap jute rope dipped in glue around a plastic ball and when it sets, you could cut the ball in half and stick the two back together"
I liked the idea, but not the method or material. It clicked however when i saw a 'plastic ball'. After having purchased the plastic ball, i bought cane and an 8 foot tall bamboo stalk. The idea of the cane was to stick it onto the plastic ball using fevi-bond and once it dried to take it off i guess.
However, even as i began this process, several people questioned whether or not it would stay. They said that since the ball would pop, would it not disrupt the cane? Honestly, at some point even i wasn't sure, after all if even your facilitators aren't sure, how can you be?
But, i somehow managed to get my cane in the arrangement i needed and waited for some time for the fevi-bond to set before i decided to pop the ball. I didn't get the chance to wait too long, since it seemed as though the cane was trying to break free of the fevi-bond holding it to the ball, but i wasn't sure if the ball itself had shrunk.
On stabbing the ball with a blade though... none of our predictions came true. It didn't pop or shrink or explode... it just was.
It took me some time to separate the fevibond from the cane, since i had to cut it away from the ball and slowly pull pieces of the ball out.
Even when i was done though, and could remove the ball, i had to continue to remove the fevibond so that my orb looked 'cleaner' to say the least.
After i managed to get my orb free from the plastic ball, i gave it a coat of varnish with wood stainer - it was a turkey wood color and ended up looking something like this:
The photo doesn't do it much justice since it almost looks like chocolate, not sure it's very tasty though :3
it's poisonous too, so no letting kids near it! (The wood stainer and varnish that is)
After this, i began sanding down my bamboo. While it's true that i seemed to be on the back end since i had only finished my orb, which took me 2 days, sanding down my bamboo took me upto 6 hours and made me bust almost 7 sheets of sandpaper... and that was before i had to sand it down by hand!
Oh, this is what a bed sander looks like: (you can look up more on google =) )
So, you place your sheet of sandpaper onto the bed and sand your wood down for a smooth finish.
After i sanded my bamboo down, i had to give it a coat of varnish and it looked pretty good. Of course, i carved out the holes required for my switches into the bamboo!
The switches were really tiny and adorable! This was mostly for the fact that i needed something super small so that my hand could conceal it. Note that i have tiny hands.
Now then, cutting holes is not easy - bamboo especially. what you need to do it draw the amount of space you think your 'item' will need and drill a hole inside that area. This is your safeguard - to prevent you bamboo from splitting mostly.
This is a power drill:
Note that when you're drilling a hole, your 'drill bit' should be of equal size or smaller than either the width or the height of the hole you're trying to create. Otherwise, you will have a gap that looks a bit odd.
These are the tools i used to widen the hole:
This is a chisel basically. In order to chisel ANYTHING and not just bamboo, you hold the instrument at an angle AWAY from you and hammer on the back of the handle.
Now, in the case of bamboo, as i said, it had the capability of splitting easily. And i said that you drill a hole into it as a 'safeguard'. the reason your hole acts as a safeguard is because when you chisel the bamboo, if you chisel into that hole, the bamboo has a very low chance of splitting.
I also used a carving knife, sadly id on't have an image of it. You use this knife once you've made your preliminary gap to carve out the hole properly and cleanly.
And that's how my two most important parts were done. Now, how to bring them together? Well... i was more desperate to have it together than have it look beautiful i guess... So...
After all my wiring, i had to figure out how to fix the bottom. the suggestion i got was to use m seal. Not the most brilliant idea thinking about it now...
but, this is what it looked like - the sphere is a TT ball.
the objects around the ball are supposed to be leaf like shapes made from PVC. I didn't need to mold them, since the ball held the shape for me. However, because i used m seal, i didn't have access to change the light inside if something happened and not just that, but the m seal made my tt ball dirty :'(
In any case, the tt ball kept shifting around too since the m seal didn't have enough time to set. So i kind of tore it off later.
The top... welll......... it looked terrible!
Okay...ahem. Horrible? I mean.. the m seal was showing and there were those disgusting colored leaves and... well, they all looked nice individually (not the m seal) so i just thought that they'd... go... well together?
Fine beat me up later! But... even i was really disappointed after my high from completing it and was tempting to break everything apart an throw it away, till my mom pointed out that we could simply dismantle it.
And that's what we did and i was back to square one, working overtime to make it look good.
I made a comeback! (takes a bow)
This looks a lot like the original that i drew, doesn't it? =D
Anyway, The golden wing like things resting on the orb were made from PVC and given a few coats of spray paint - to be more precise a metallic gold spray paint. the curves are being held by the PVC wings simply because i used a thin wire tacked down to it to mold it into any shape i desire! That's why it has such prominent curves.
Secondly, the wings aren't actually attached to the orb. there's a wire that runs through the wings held in between the wings by double sided tape. the wire has been looped around the orb so that it hold both the wings and the orb together (so long as the sticky tape holds the wire to the orb) and is then looped around the top of the bamboo held in place by tacking it down.
I covered all the visible parts of the wire with my varnish wood stainer mix, so it's not as visible and doesn't look odd. the cuff like thing around the top is also a small piece of PVC that was given a coat of varnish and wood stainer and tacked down.
So, this is what it looks like in the night!
Since as i said earlier that i had dismantled it completely, i didn't have a light that could be placed in the orb at the top.
So, we had illuminated it from the outside using an LED torch and well... you can see the results for yourself.
Now for the bottom - this took me awhile to figure out, but once i did, it was pretty simple. So, i cut out the leaf shapes i wanted and instead of sticking it on the inside, i got a piece of wood that almost fit in the diameter of the bamboo's inside. after tacking the leaves into it, i began the process of hammering it in. this was where i had to be careful, since if my wires went in, they would never come out and secondly, i had to make sure that my wires didn't get cut.
After having successfully placed my wooden block in, i made my wire connections and attached my TT ball to it. It's true that it did stick to the double sided tape that was already there, however, it wasn't exactly staying. so i tacked it down using the leaves made of PVC.
These leaves i painted green using ceramic paints!
And overall, this is what it looks like!
I can't tell you how relieved i am to have finished this piece and that it looks so good.
So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask =)
i named her Kreide - this is what she looks like!
So, the tetra pack is her body, pinched in the middle to give her a waist. the head is just a small ball of wool and the hair i braided using embroidery thread. after i put it on the ball of wool, i stitched it down using a pink embroidery thread so it looked like it was some sort of hairband.
The belt around her waist is a braid made by using 'doug's braid'. it's a seven loop braid and kind of hard to make since you can't really take a break in between and it takes time. but it's fun to do and worth the effort in my opinion.
the hands i made i breaking a pencil and then wrapping it with wool after making holes in the appropriate places in the tetra pack. the dress too was made by using embroidery thread simply wrapped around. honestly speaking, i didn't think it would stay. i had my doubts.
The second reason was that i had made 'pinhole' drawings not originals of course - based on anime characters with the help of a print out and they loved it!
This is what they look like when lit up!
This one is from a series called 'Ah! my Goddess' and from the one on the extreme right is Urd, in the center is Belldandy and i kinda forgot the left most one's name....
This one's from an anime called Inuyasha - the one at the bottom is Kagome and at the top, holding the sword is Inuyasha.
This girl is from an anime called card captor sakura (i liked the manga and the movies more though... they were so... touching :') ) and obviously, the girl holding the staff is sakura and if you can identify a tiny creature waving from her right shoulder, that's kero.
Those were probably the two reasons as to why i was placed there and i was pretty excited as well!
of course, i didn't expect that we'd make products of anything, but i was definitely looking forward to what sort of explorations we'd do related to light.
our first assignment was to draw structures and identify how they were put together - through welding or screws and so on... the point was to understand how structures are made and with that understanding probably use it to make something. i wasn't that far from the truth... but it also made me learn a few other things.
Yes, it's kind of obvious that making a product is not as easy as you think... but, the amount of forethought that tends to go into it is rather amazing when you try to figure out how and why things were put together the way they were, the number of failures they must have gone through before they found the perfect design... how they thought about the ergonomics (an applied science concerned with designing and arranging things people use so that the people and things interact most efficiently and safely) and as a result might have compromised on the aesthetics to a certain extent.
The next assignment was similar to the first... we had to figure out how things were put together and then 'check' if we were right.
this was the drawing i made by guessing what must have been inside the boombox.
there were time when i wanted to open certain parts because it was only then that i realized that though i had used this product often enough, i knew next to nothing about what might be its contents...
and at that point i realized that very few of us understand and actually 'see' like the avatar 'i see you' see products for what they are and their value.
considering that we use some products very often, do you not find it strange?
and so, i reached a point where i could finally... dismantle it and all my assumptions about not understanding the product came true.
And so i felt kind of silly by the end of the assignment, but definitely gained more respect for those who designed these products, i suddenly realized how hard it might be to make a beautiful finished product.
After this, we were then asked to draw out the 'floor plan' of the second floor of our college. Sounds simpler than it seems... you see, most structures would try to go with a conventional design that is easy to see on a floor plan, however, in our college, part of the walls start extending outwards, this meant that some of the pillars or beams had been displaced on that side.
Which as we began to draw out confused us and made little to no sense.
This was the brief sketch i made at first for the basic layout plan... it looks very unstable... however, once drawn in scale, it looked... normal, relatively.
in this drawing, we were expected to place furniture, the brick partitions as well as the actual layout. And so i did...
After the struggles of making this, we were then expected to draw out the structures of 'organic' structures. Sounds nice and fun like a biology class i guess... however, we were expected to draw what we thought was the skeleton of the tree or plant was in straight lines and then over it place an ohp sheet and draw out the actual tree or plant as we see it.
This was far easier than when we were trying to draw the layout of our school since we could see the entire tree as well as a closeup. the hard part was trying to figure out whether or not you wanted to split a curve into two lines or make it a single line as well as how accurate you wished to be.
Anyway... after having my pride cut down, we were asked to make 'something', literally anything from mount board, masking tape, twine and a coconut broom. This was given to us after we were asked to look up some architects and designers and i was quite inspired by Antoni Gaudi as well as Frank Llyod Wright's 'Falling water' and was thinking of making a 'building'.
This was my initial design, since i wasn't exactly sure what i wanted to do.
i openly admit that i had absolutely NO idea what i was trying to achieve or what i was trying to draw... so let's not go there at all.
what i started doing and what i ended up making... well, i'm not sure how that happened either.
So i started by making the 'dome' that would be mostly made of glass or something which would be right at the top. the technique i used was similar to basketry, except instead of using bamboo slivers OR cane, i used the coconut leaf broom's sticks.
After i looked at this, i realized that it wouldn't stand on it's own or hold it's shape unless held i place as seen on the right. but this meant that i couldn't use it as a dome for the top of the building... also, the more i thought about it, the more i realized that as a staff top it would look far better.
so... i attached the stem of the staff. but because of the height, it felt off mostly because the top wasn't big enough or flashy enough to off set the size of the length of the staff and make it look normal. in the end, it looked something like this -
it looked quite nice as it was, but of course i still wanted to improve it, so i gave it a coat of paint...
And it looks like this!
A little after this, we decided to explore 'lights' and how to light things...
This was created by using a white LED torch on two sheets of glaze paper - one red and one yellow. the closer the torch is to the color, the more vividly it shows.
In this case, i wrapped a chart paper around the camera lens and took a photo of the LED torch from above, to see how much light would be shown and how well it would capture it.
This one was simply crumpled glaze paper, under which i placed the LED torch to see how much i could crumple it and as you'll see in the next image how the glow of the light could change because of that.
this was a small object i made, wanting to see or know how the light would reflect off of surfaces especially if i would make a lamp a little later.
Now we had reach the third week and had to decide and design what we would make. The first decision we had to make was whether or not we wanted to make something that was utilitarian. the more i thought about it, the less appealing making something utilitarian sounded. so instead, i decided to make something that was not utilitarian while at the same time having a back up plan in case what i wished to do wasn't possible.
my backup plan was making a statue from shattered glass - something along the lines of making an ohp sheet base to work on and making it almost like a cubist product.
i admit that it looks kind of silly and quite childish, but i love anime things, so i guess i wanted something like an 'anime girl' for my statue... though i wasn't a 100% sure how it would turn out, but sure that it would work.
my actual product that i decided to design though, was a staff. i've always wanted one so i decided to make one.
When i first tried to design my staff, i found myself leaning towards the conventional designs that most staffs have, till i realized that i just needed to look for inspiration.
my inspiration became more defined as i tried to understand what i was looking for. as i drew these designs, the things in my mind were - wings, buds or flowers, trees and patterns created by creepers or vines.
This design came from a little bit of inspiration from an anime called Tsubasa Chronicles (Chronicle of the wing)
this was my inspiration and what helped fix my final design:
The final design ended up looking like this:
Once i got a green sign for it, i began to discus materials...
At first i thought i would make the stem of the staff using metal and give it a coat of papier mache so as to give it a 'woody feel', make the orb of the staff with wire and cover it with plastic. the wings on top were to be made with either ohp or acrylic sheets and at the bottom a similar setup was to be made.
however, it was pointed out by my facilitators that i could use bamboo since that could be bent using something called 'heat treatment' you use the same method when you wish to bend metal pipes as well.
And So... making a teeny weeny prototype began. while making this prototype, i thought 'What if one could put lights in it and have switches? This meant that i'd need to carve 2 holes into the bamboo and insert all my wiring on the inside, which was a nice idea, i just wasn't sure how well it would go.
For my teeny weeny prototype (i'm going to start calling it proto now) i decided to make the ball from wire. While wire manipulation is a bit hard, i somehow managed to get it to resemble a ball of some sort, but then as i tried to cover it either from the inside or the outside, neither seemed to work.
Assuming that it was just the plastic that was not as mold-able as clay, i gave up. I tried a different attempt with paper by trying to make a paper ball, but even that didn't seem to work since the effect i wanted and the effect i got were completely different, i kept it as a back burner option.
After i made several realizations - from how am going to connect my top to my bottom, to how do i cover my orb? - i kept them in mind as i chose my materials.
While we had a second round of material session discussions, one of my facilitators said "You could wrap jute rope dipped in glue around a plastic ball and when it sets, you could cut the ball in half and stick the two back together"
I liked the idea, but not the method or material. It clicked however when i saw a 'plastic ball'. After having purchased the plastic ball, i bought cane and an 8 foot tall bamboo stalk. The idea of the cane was to stick it onto the plastic ball using fevi-bond and once it dried to take it off i guess.
However, even as i began this process, several people questioned whether or not it would stay. They said that since the ball would pop, would it not disrupt the cane? Honestly, at some point even i wasn't sure, after all if even your facilitators aren't sure, how can you be?
But, i somehow managed to get my cane in the arrangement i needed and waited for some time for the fevi-bond to set before i decided to pop the ball. I didn't get the chance to wait too long, since it seemed as though the cane was trying to break free of the fevi-bond holding it to the ball, but i wasn't sure if the ball itself had shrunk.
On stabbing the ball with a blade though... none of our predictions came true. It didn't pop or shrink or explode... it just was.
It took me some time to separate the fevibond from the cane, since i had to cut it away from the ball and slowly pull pieces of the ball out.
Even when i was done though, and could remove the ball, i had to continue to remove the fevibond so that my orb looked 'cleaner' to say the least.
After i managed to get my orb free from the plastic ball, i gave it a coat of varnish with wood stainer - it was a turkey wood color and ended up looking something like this:
The photo doesn't do it much justice since it almost looks like chocolate, not sure it's very tasty though :3
it's poisonous too, so no letting kids near it! (The wood stainer and varnish that is)
After this, i began sanding down my bamboo. While it's true that i seemed to be on the back end since i had only finished my orb, which took me 2 days, sanding down my bamboo took me upto 6 hours and made me bust almost 7 sheets of sandpaper... and that was before i had to sand it down by hand!
Oh, this is what a bed sander looks like: (you can look up more on google =) )
So, you place your sheet of sandpaper onto the bed and sand your wood down for a smooth finish.
After i sanded my bamboo down, i had to give it a coat of varnish and it looked pretty good. Of course, i carved out the holes required for my switches into the bamboo!
The switches were really tiny and adorable! This was mostly for the fact that i needed something super small so that my hand could conceal it. Note that i have tiny hands.
Now then, cutting holes is not easy - bamboo especially. what you need to do it draw the amount of space you think your 'item' will need and drill a hole inside that area. This is your safeguard - to prevent you bamboo from splitting mostly.
This is a power drill:
Note that when you're drilling a hole, your 'drill bit' should be of equal size or smaller than either the width or the height of the hole you're trying to create. Otherwise, you will have a gap that looks a bit odd.
These are the tools i used to widen the hole:
This is a chisel basically. In order to chisel ANYTHING and not just bamboo, you hold the instrument at an angle AWAY from you and hammer on the back of the handle.
Now, in the case of bamboo, as i said, it had the capability of splitting easily. And i said that you drill a hole into it as a 'safeguard'. the reason your hole acts as a safeguard is because when you chisel the bamboo, if you chisel into that hole, the bamboo has a very low chance of splitting.
I also used a carving knife, sadly id on't have an image of it. You use this knife once you've made your preliminary gap to carve out the hole properly and cleanly.
And that's how my two most important parts were done. Now, how to bring them together? Well... i was more desperate to have it together than have it look beautiful i guess... So...
After all my wiring, i had to figure out how to fix the bottom. the suggestion i got was to use m seal. Not the most brilliant idea thinking about it now...
but, this is what it looked like - the sphere is a TT ball.
the objects around the ball are supposed to be leaf like shapes made from PVC. I didn't need to mold them, since the ball held the shape for me. However, because i used m seal, i didn't have access to change the light inside if something happened and not just that, but the m seal made my tt ball dirty :'(
In any case, the tt ball kept shifting around too since the m seal didn't have enough time to set. So i kind of tore it off later.
The top... welll......... it looked terrible!
Okay...ahem. Horrible? I mean.. the m seal was showing and there were those disgusting colored leaves and... well, they all looked nice individually (not the m seal) so i just thought that they'd... go... well together?
Fine beat me up later! But... even i was really disappointed after my high from completing it and was tempting to break everything apart an throw it away, till my mom pointed out that we could simply dismantle it.
And that's what we did and i was back to square one, working overtime to make it look good.
I made a comeback! (takes a bow)
This looks a lot like the original that i drew, doesn't it? =D
Anyway, The golden wing like things resting on the orb were made from PVC and given a few coats of spray paint - to be more precise a metallic gold spray paint. the curves are being held by the PVC wings simply because i used a thin wire tacked down to it to mold it into any shape i desire! That's why it has such prominent curves.
Secondly, the wings aren't actually attached to the orb. there's a wire that runs through the wings held in between the wings by double sided tape. the wire has been looped around the orb so that it hold both the wings and the orb together (so long as the sticky tape holds the wire to the orb) and is then looped around the top of the bamboo held in place by tacking it down.
I covered all the visible parts of the wire with my varnish wood stainer mix, so it's not as visible and doesn't look odd. the cuff like thing around the top is also a small piece of PVC that was given a coat of varnish and wood stainer and tacked down.
So, this is what it looks like in the night!
Since as i said earlier that i had dismantled it completely, i didn't have a light that could be placed in the orb at the top.
So, we had illuminated it from the outside using an LED torch and well... you can see the results for yourself.
Now for the bottom - this took me awhile to figure out, but once i did, it was pretty simple. So, i cut out the leaf shapes i wanted and instead of sticking it on the inside, i got a piece of wood that almost fit in the diameter of the bamboo's inside. after tacking the leaves into it, i began the process of hammering it in. this was where i had to be careful, since if my wires went in, they would never come out and secondly, i had to make sure that my wires didn't get cut.
After having successfully placed my wooden block in, i made my wire connections and attached my TT ball to it. It's true that it did stick to the double sided tape that was already there, however, it wasn't exactly staying. so i tacked it down using the leaves made of PVC.
These leaves i painted green using ceramic paints!
And overall, this is what it looks like!
I can't tell you how relieved i am to have finished this piece and that it looks so good.
So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask =)
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