PROJECT 2: 2D Surface Design

(apologies for the poor photo quality)

Initially I had no idea what to look for in terms of inspiration for this project, but then I remembered my mom owns a bunch of weird decorative nonsense so I scoped that out to find some inspiration. The first piece is a sort of decorative cage thing that frankly I have no idea what it's for, while flowery, I found it also had a sort of 'solar' quality, particularly in the light, that was a seed of the ornamental design I eventually came up with. The second is from a table cloth, I liked the radial forms, which I drew from but tempered with the simple shapes and the colour-on-black of the third, which is from a blanket. 

Initially I had a few broad concepts in mind (solar, geometric, radial, colour), drawn from the sources that inspired me, but had no end goal in mind, in contrast to the previous project, where I knew what I wanted from minute one. in lieu of a concrete concept, I goofed around with colour hatching and shapes, these didn't lead to directly to a finished product, but it did lay a groundwork; the curved-inward diamond shapes and yellow-purple colour palette were the necessary catalysts to truly get started. It was fun to experiment directly in Rhino rather than working out the problem in sketches like I might normally do.

Once I got started in earnest it didn't take very long at all to reach a final design, I diverged fairly strongly from the material I initially documented for inspiration, but that's hardly a problem in my opinion, sometimes inspiration is very direct, and you can trace a clearly lineage from it to your own work, and sometimes it just a starting point for something else entirely. Here it is almost finished, but you can see on the corners that simply rotating them didn't work, so instead I had to mirror them 

I used just about every tool in the book, the rotation tool being particularly important to completing the project in a timely fashion, the central diamond I made from mirroring an arc line, and I made the corner pieces as a whole, and then simply trimmed three quarters off and mirrored a few copies around. To get the triangles around the polygons on the corners lined up, I created an offset curve to attach them to with Osnap, and then simply deleted the offset when I was happy with how they looked.

And here they are in glorious Technicolor, very different from the materials I sourced, though I think you can still trace various elements back to them, in particular, the second colour variant was very directly inspired by the blanket in the third picture. No idea where the eyeballs came from, guess I just thought it looked fun.