Back to Ballpoint

Product2 midterms are done now. These past few days made for another crazy week. I learned the importance of transitioning to 3D sooner in the design process, or at least when it is necessary to determine if something will actually work. Sketching is appropriate for certain things, when expressing ideas or giving a sense of how something WILL work. But when it comes down to executing a design in order to move forward in the deBacsign process and bring the product to fruition, it is vital to start building even if what you are making is not necessarily completely refined or thought through. Working in 3D reveals possibilities that sketching sometimes will not, and ideas will spawn from just holding a study model in your hands or pushing a mock-up around.

Anyway, this coming week I need to create tubing and a pathway for my push/pull toy. These are some sketches of forms that I did in class using ballpoint. It's been a while since I used ballpoint but this page really reminded me how fun it is as a medium. I initially stopped using it because you can't marker over it but now that I am depending on lines for values, I'm not really using marker's to render too much. That is on the list of things to become good at though so, maybe I'll start marker rendering in the near future. Despite what I said about 3D building, sketching of course remains the most efficient way to express, create, and sift through ideas. At the beginning of Product2 this term, I discovered how sketching forms on a page without necessarily any clear concrete direction can lead to other ideas.