I’ve been trying a lot of new things at Marywood recently, and a lot of these new experiences can be attributed to my Art Foundation Year 3D Design class. The only other time I seriously tried to create anything in the 3D format prior to my college experience is a life sized popcorn box that I’ve been working on since early 2020 (which was a high school project turned personal project due to the pandemic). It has been interesting to see how my creative process works with a 3D format, and while I know I have a long way to go before my 3D art is anything more than mediocre, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made and challenges I’ve overcome thus far. As such, I’d like to elaborate on a more recent project I did for my 3D class, as I struggled with being overly ambitious. Luckily for me, I persevered and my ambitions did not end up hurting me (too much) in the long run. 

The assignment for my 3D class was to create a pop-up book with an origami figure, with the intent of it being possible to interact with it (essentially, for the figure and the set to be “playable”). I wanted to go with a fantasy creature long before my professor even presented the class with origami books to use as a reference, and as such, I ended up wanting to construct a Pegasus for my scene (the featured image shows from the book what the final product is intended to look like).

While I should not have been surprised, that Pegasus was very difficult to construct; it took my professor and I about two hours to figure out the first half, and then it took me another four or five hours (maybe even more, I honestly lost track of time) to reconstruct the Pegasus and to create the background for it.

The Pegasus was definitely one of the more complicated creatures I could have created for this assignment, but I didn’t want to give up. My newness to the art of origami as a whole certainly did not help my lack of understanding the book’s instructions, and I can say that I feel my background for the Pegasus suffered a bit as a result. While I did intend for it to be more simplistic and modern, I could have added more to the foreground, or adjusted the scale in relation to the Pegasus . Even so, I’m proud that I accomplished such an intricate figure, and I do think that all things considered, it could have gone worse.