El Tigre.
Ferocious Illuminations.
Ferocious Illuminations.
Both my partner Melissa and I came from previous lamp projects decided to work on a new lamp together. We initially found a mounted moose lamp that we were really interested in, but couldn’t figure out how we would do conceptually. That first inspiration led to a discussion about animals and ultimately we decided upon a tiger lamp. The concept for our tiger lamp was simple; a tiger with instead of black stripes, slits allowing light to come out of the hollow inside where little lights can be slipped inside. We liked the concept of the little LED lights, which are very popular decorations. Keeping the joinery factor in mind we engineered ball joints for the limbs to be put together. We chose ball joints because they would create the best sense of movement. The other factor we wanted was for the project to be printed in a copper filament. Unfortunately, the filament has yet to arrive so our mini prototype is what we have produced at this juncture. The prototype is smaller than the final product will be, as to not waste filament before producing our final model. We are looking forward to our final result with this project.
Once we came up with the idea of the tiger lamp, we were stuck on making it realistic. We built it out of shapes and tried to manipulate them, but it was a constant struggle. So eventually we just decided to take a different approach. We started with a picture, then traced it piece by piece and extruded the curves to create shapes. We then pulled the pieces apart to create the different parts that would connect together. Once there, we created ball and socket joints and attached them to the legs to create some movement in our figure. We then though about how to make it possible to put lights inside to make it into a lamp, so we hollowed it out and sliced the tail end off and put hooks so it could be detached. We put a hole in the bottom so the cord of the lights could come out that way. After that, we traced the face to give him a nose and eyes, and boolean differenced them out of the face just a little bit. We then did the same thing with the stripes; traced them, extruded the curves, and boolean differenced them to create the cut out look. From there, we printed. We struggled getting the body to print the way we wanted it to, and are currently still working on that. Once we get it to work, we will print it with our copper filament when it comes in, and we will have a functioning lamp like we had envisioned in the first place.
Partner and collaborator: Melissa Mandel https://sillysalamanderblog.wordpress.com/