Dinosaur Dolan Designs

This has been quite a journey. I have gone over every speck of my destroyed car (and reference images of intact Versa Notes) to compare it to the model I have created and revised. I have reconciled what was possible to recreate in paper against what I saw and what skill I have, and hopefully, done an sufficient job in striking a balance.  It has been important to me during this project to stay true, not just to the spirit of the vehicle and it's meaning to me (over say, absolute visual/proportional accuracy) but also to the spirit of the material I was working in. I have considered the limitations of paper and tried to stay within the boundaries of what one can possibly ask, or should ask, cardstock to do. This is linked to the study of the Constructivists/ Constructionists I undertook in Sculpture class last semester. There's a kind of honour and reverence in knowing the limits of the material and showing it as best you can, acknowledging the faktura, as well as the constructi

The joys of prototyping - you construct your object only to discover what doesn't work. No worries, this is the best part - this is the FIX.  I ended up identifying many fixes from the first object that I put together. In fact, I ended up starting a new prototype because there were so many issues - size, durability and fragility being the leading issues.  Floppy  So I remodelled the car, looking for more opportunities to reduce roof weight and increase lateral stability - including sizing down.  The new size was already much more stable vertically  Issues I identified with the new model: swoosh tabs - the tabs are bigger than the piece itself - will make the tabs much smaller long tabs in places that needed cutting down Adding tabs I'm still much happier with this (slightly wonky) prototype. It looks like my car, and it's pretty accurate. I look forward to completing it today, finishing up the wheels and showing it in class on Monday

  This week I continued to develop a papercraft sculpture. We reviewed the tab process - and although I never quite got the trim process to work for me, I did manage to utilize split very handily.  I really hemmed and hawwed over chosing an object. On one hand, a lot of the things I care about seemed trivial or derivative, on the other, I had an object that changed my life...but it seemed too heavy.  I decided to face the hard thing. My object is my destroyed car. I have avoided looking at pictures of this object for a long time, so it was an interesting exercise in reference. I was driving the car when it was totalled by a van making an illegal turn. More than two years later, I live with the ongoing effects of that moment. I started by laying an image in rhino and getting a sense of the flow of the car, by setting up points.  I mirrored the points and created planar surfaces between them, then laid vertical planes in. I extruded curves I had built from the original points to create w