Ideas Into Design Concepts
I decided to make a lamp to address the problem of not enough light on my desk at home. My main light in my room is very dim and I often have to squint to look at small print on my homework assignments and when I am making small details in my drawings. I also wanted a lamp so that I could read before bed at night since I can’t open my bigger light because it might distract my younger brother from sleeping.
I chose to make a lamp with a complicated design of two of Vincent Van Gogh’s most famous paintings: “Starry Night” and “Sunflowers,” since I really like to draw. My original idea was for two sides facing opposite of each other to be a design of “Starry Night” and the other two sides facing opposite of each other to be a design of “Sunflowers.” I wanted the bottom to just be blank and the top to be a lightbulb with the words “Vincent Van Gogh” on it (and I wanted to do a lightbulb because when an artist gets inspirations for a piece of art, it’s like a lightbulb moment). I ended up changing the top into a design of hexagons since I thought it would look better and I also decided to print my name on the bottom of my lamp. I wanted to make my lamp 160mm by 170mm with 3mm fingers.
I made a huge mistake on Fusion that cost me a lot of time in changing my design when I accidentally made a few sides to be shorter on my width and the others to be shorter on the length. My idea was to turn the designs around on cardboard, but I forgot that the lengths of my sides were not all the same. Something I should have done was to just make all the sides the same length. I also accidentally made all of my fingers 10mm since I did not know that the length of the fingers would be the length of the wood. Because of that, I had to offset all of my fingers to be 5mm smaller on the length. Because of my idea to not make all the designs face the same way, (what I mean by this is that, in the picture, you can see that the Starry Night sides are facing one way and the Sunflowers are facing another. This became a problem because that meant the length of the Starry Night side was 160mm and the width was 170mm and the Sunflower side was 170mm on the length and 160mm on the length) I had to offset all of the fingers again and again (based on the information I got from my cardboard cutouts of how my fingers and sides fit together.
I cut out cardboard prototypes 3 times because of my miscalculation on the sides. After I offset all of the lines for the Sunflower sides, I realized that I would have to offset my sides for the top and bottom as well because the sides were longer, which meant the top and bottom would be too small unless if I made them longer as well. I measured the distance my top and bottom were from the sides on my cardboard prototype (since I stupidly forgot that the sides were now longer than the top and bottom) and found out that each width side needed to be 5mm longer (including the fingers). I offset those lines again and printed my first wood cut.
On my first cardboard cutout, I also faced problems in Lightburn, with breaking the lines. I wanted the sky of my Starry Night design to be cut out and the background of my Sunflowers design to be cut out. This became a problem because the lines that needed to be cut out were connected to other lines in my design. Mr. Walton taught me how to break lines, which allowed the lines I wanted to be cut to be broken off of some other lines that were not meant to be cut.
Growth Into Skills
During my journey of making this lamp, I learned how to use the extend, trim, offset, mirror, spline, line, exploding text, circle, circular pattern, rectangular pattern, and rectangle tools in Fusion.
The offset tool was essential in fixing my design, since I had to offset many of my fingers to make the measurements correct. The trim and extend tool helped me in trimming some extra lines on my fingers and the extend took helped me extend some spline lines to be where I wanted them to be. I used the spline tool the most, since my design needed a lot of curves. My Sunflower design needed a lot of petals, so I used the circular pattern tool to get most of the petals. I used the circle for the center of my sunflowers and I used rectangles and straight lines to make the houses and bushes (the round things around the houses are supposed to be bushes) in the Starry Night Design. I used the exploding text tool to explode my name on the bottom on my lamp. I did not end up using the rectangular pattern and mirror tools in my lamp, but I do remember how to use them.
In Lightburn, I learned how to color the lines and break lines. For coloring lines, I learned that red=cut, blue=fill, and black=etch. For breaking lines, I learned that I needed to 1. Click the polygon looking shape on the tool-bar on the left with dots on the points 2. Click on the line I want to break 3. Click “i” on the keyboard to make a point 4. Click the point you want to break 5. Click “b” on the keyboard and then if you click the line again, it will be broken!
Using the spline tool was difficult for me for making some of the petals for the sunflowers because I had to make the spline line pointy for the edge of the petal. Thought at times it was hard to use, the spline tool was my favorite tool because it allowed me to create detailed curves in my design, just the the curved Van Gogh used for his painting.
Reflection
One tip I MUST give to incoming students is to LISTEN TO MS. KIM, especially on the first few days when making an Autodesk account. Some students in my class had problems with their Autodesk accounts and had to take time to fix the problems. Though the problem they had were because of computer problems and not because they did not listen, Ms. Kim has told everyone in my class multiple times that students in the past who did not listen had a lot of problems with their accounts. So, to the incoming students: If you don’t want Ms. Kim to rage, LISTEN TO HER.
If I could redo this class again, I would definitely fix my problem of my miscalculation on the side lengths. I did not notice my mistake on my first cardboard printout and had a huge “OHH” moment when I looked back at my Fusion a while later and realized my huge mistake. Next time, I would definitely just make all the sides face the same direction and not try making it more complicated by rotating it around.
Something I would want to change about this course is the limited amount of time given to students. I chose a more complicated design and had to take a lot of extra classes to finish (also because of my stupidity of accidentally making the side lengths not the same). I would recommend extending the time given to the students for this project, because in my opinion, quality is more important than quantity. I would much rather make one project that I am proud of than several projects that I do not like.
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