As of our week of idioms, I have been working hard on creating a piece to represent the idiom “Building Castles in the Sky”. The piece is a little over half way done due to the fine detail work still having to be completed. But, overall, my work has been very productive.
In the piece, a clay castle sits on a hollowed out cloud base. The cloud will be used to demonstrate that the piece takes place in the sky, and the castle on top will also show that the castle isn’t high enough to touch the clouds but is actually in the clouds itself. This design would be able to stop the misconception that the castle is a normal castle on the ground. A student at my table suggested this to me as my first idea for creating a sky in the project was to put small clouds around the towers of the castle. This idea was inevitably scrapped due to-as said before-not correctly showing that the castle is actually in air, and I went on with the cloud base concept instead.
To do this project, I had to heavily rely on my maquette and notebook drawings to get the perfect design to portray my idiom. Drawing several versions of the castle especially helped me to see what parts really make a castle look the way it does. I also used almost everything from the maquette to complete the final product: the cloud base, the base of the castle, towers, etc. This not only helped me get through the project faster, but also helped to me to realize where certain pieces of the castle should go, which pieces should stay, and which should be scrapped. The design of the castle was the hardest part of the project for me, so this method really lead me in the right direction. For example, one of the hardest challenges was nailing the look of the castle towers and the roofs on top of them. However, I was able to learn from my maquette that more towers-and more roofs-would make the structure more realistic as well as what shape makes the roofs of the castle tower-like.