TA'ing a foundation on 3D design.

Helping Yvonne Escalante to teach a Foundation Class in 3D design (or Art13) has been an AMAZING experience. During the course we will challenge the student to solve four main assignments. The student will learn concepts of design as well as the vocabulary necessary to navigate issues in the three dimensions. One learning outcome of this class is to present the student to materials such as: plaster, plasticine, clay, wood and glass in a variety of contexts. We will be doing sand castings of glass and aluminum; free sculpting plasticine and clay to make ceramic tiles; mold making in plaster, ideal to translate forms into different materials; wood as a structural material for an exploration of three dimensional planes.

First exercise: Buy at the 99cent store one item. Make a plaster mold from that item. Duplicate it. In the next set of images you see a sample of the work made by the students.

Second Exercise: Take a portion of your face, abstract it and translate the image into three different materials: clay, glass and aluminum.

This is a composite image taken from the twenty-four students enrolled in the art 13 course at SJSU-fall 2012. The assignment attempts to instruct the student in casting and rendering in three different materials: glass, aluminum, and ceramics. Each student will print the section of his/her own face into a 5" by 5" square piece of paper. Maintaing all proportions to the image, the student will render the 2 dimentional shape into a 3 dimentional form. The student is encouraged to transform and abstract the image to be rendered. What we are giving them is a parameter, a scale, and a theme. What we want is a texture, a volume and a concept.