For project 3, we were assigned to find a ‘shape’ from a SEM image, and constructing a structure from it!

I chose the SEM of pu’er tea! It looks interesting with both a long & narrow strip, and round blobs attached to the sides.

shapes that I had picked out from the first picture

      

Coming up with possible structure designs and considering what materials can I use

In the end I went with the nest-looking design, as its cup shape seems to be more relatable to ‘tea’.

I had already planned to use cotton buds to represent the blobs. So there’s that. But in order to construct the bent loopy ‘strings’ to create the nest, I need to find something flexible and is long and narrow. Here’s some of the materials that I used:

Got a styrofoam ball so that the strings can wrapped around it while being covered in craft glue. When it dries, removing it from the styrofoam ball will thus form a hardened round shape.

The raffia strings were difficult to work with as it’s made entirely out of plastic, thus being unable to glue down to the spherical ball. The twine was fine to work with but the structure looked too stiff, not exactly portraying the texture that I envisioned my structure to be.

I ended up finding this raffia string that is made out paper! It was able to adhere well to the styrofoam ball and giving the sleek looking texture that I wanted, woohoo!

What it looks like on the ball. I also plucked up a few strings to make it look messier (nest)

After removing the ball and trimming the edges down. I hot-glued the cotton buds on to random parts of the strings from different angles. Here is the finished product!! (o˘◡˘o)

I like how bright my sculpture looks and I guess it may be more likely to draw people in to look closely at it? Hahaha. In the end it looks more like a bowl/cover than a nest, but the overall shape still looks nice and gives off the ‘messy’ structure that I wanted.

The method of using the styrofoam ball was also really fun as it was my first time trying it out, but it actually helped made the strings super stiff and secure, but not compromising the original texture of the strings. Now that I think about it, it’s interesting how we can create a sculpture just by deriving a shape/pattern from another object.

That’s all, bye!

(in case anyone was wondering what happened to the twine version, hahaha)