Ideas, influences and prototypes for my final sculpture task 1

Ideas

Whilst taking the photos for my primary research i became very interested in the possibilities for making a spherical shape out of paper and how this would be possible. These are the photos that influenced this idea the most was the spherical fountains out side Sheffield Winter Gardens.

I also liked this abstract take on a spherical fountain in side the Winter Gardens as it is an interesting take on my idea of using spheres to make a circular shaped sculpture.

Influences 

After deciding on my idea for my final sculpture I started to look at ways to create a sphere using mathematical and geometric shapes to influence my designs . From my secondary research I found most shapes that had curves in them or started to make a spherical shape they had pentagons and hexagons in them.

So on deciding this i thought i would search the internet to see if it was possible to make a sphere using pentagons and hexagons, and came up with 2 results a Bucket ball which has 32 faces 20 are made from hexagons and 12 are made from pentagons. The other result that came up was called a Dodecahedron which is made up of 12 pentagons. After considering this I thought that the best option was to make a Bucket ball as it resulted in a more spherical shape and did look quite as flat sided.  

This is a net I drew out of how a bucket ball would fit together as you can see there as 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons. I cut this out and and started to assemble the net  to make a small prototype.

Prototype

 

To make my prototype I cut out the net and scored along all the joining lines to make it easier to bend and fold . as you can see I photographed the process of assembling it together I was making this quickly to test out to see how easy and well it worked, so only stuck it together using tape.


The conclusion I made from this prototype is that i really like the aesthetic look of the sphere and it fits well into the brief. But i found assembling it as one complete net was difficult to bend and manipulate into place and ended up with many gaps. so thought about how to over come this problem and decided it would be easier drawing easy side out separately and create 5mm flaps on each side to join them together.