In late October Dave and I set off in a 22-ft Penske truck for southern California to install our latest two sculptures in two different juried exhibitions. First stop San Diego where we installed our piece Sprouted Bumbershoot in the Urban Trees 7 exhibition. » Continue reading “Two Sculptures, Two Exhibitions, One Long Trip”
Come late October when the rains have started here in the Portland area, Dave and I will be catching a little sunshine in Palm Desert, California. That’s where we will be installing our latest large scale metal sculpture Shapely Two. The piece was juried into the 2010-2012 El Paseo Sculpture Invitational along with 17 other sculptures from around the nation. The art will line El Paseo Drive, adding even more dazzle to the town’s glitzy shopping district. » Continue reading “Shapely Series Ready for Take-Off”
Now comes the fun part. I get to take the laser cut steel panels I showed you in the previous post and begin to form them into their intended shape. When we built the first Shapely I chose to construct an internal armature to support the 16 gauge shell (shown in the next two pictures) .
What I had hoped to do with this project was share with you how we create one of our box construction metal sculptures and journal my thoughts along the way. Clearly I got ahead of myself and a lot of work has already occured to get to this point. No matter, let’s just go back to the beginning. It will probably take a few posts to catch up so please bear with me.
If you’ve been following us you’ve already seen the renderings of Shapely Two Jennifer posted last fall. They were generated from the 3D CAD data I created in Rhino 4.0 using Jennifer’s original design sketch as a guide.
We scanned Jennifer’s sketch into Photoshop and saved it as a JPEG image. Then I pulled that image into Rhino as a background and traced several profiles . Once I had the profiles Jennifer and I sat down and she shared with me her thoughts on the third dimension. That information combined with the previously mentioned profiles enabled the genetation of the 3D surfaces. After several iterations we came up with a basic shape. Next we spent multiple iterations refining the color scheme which naturally lead to additional tweaks to the geometry. After several weeks we finalized the design you see here.
At this point the art is 90% complete. We are now ready for the craft.
The next step was to make patterns for all the exterior surfaces. This is where we gain significant benefits from using CAD. Having the design digitally captured allows us to use that data to have panels accurately produced for us. Rhino has a really nice feature which unrolls developed surfaces (in otherwords, flattens out the curves) and automatically generates patterns.
These data files were then sent off to our laser cutter and 3 days later we had these.
Time to begin fabricating. Stay tuned.
