Milestone Project 2: Hat Papercraft Process

Welp, there goes the rest of the semester. Although it's no one's fault and no one could have foreseen these circumstances, I truly will miss this class and the projects we were headed towards. With this unexpected closure in mind, I was not able to fully complete the papercraft assignment, but here's what I do have:

I retooled the shape of my hat to reflect a ore whimsical vibe, with different proportions and an asymmetrical slant. While I was unfolding and preparing the model to be cut, I originally wanted to go with the flower method, but I soon realized that this would limit the size of the individual strips and make glueing tabs challenging, as most of the glueable area would be enclosed inside the hat. With that in mind, I opted to have most of the edges scored with tabs going down, so that I could construct the hat from top to bottom. After printing, however, I learned the hard way that the slight loss of surface area that comes with scoring made the angles of the original model impossible. If we had more time on this project, I would attach the top ring layer of the hat to the very top, and then have the rest formed using the flower method.

Assignment 7: Papercraft Prototype

In order to prepare myself for crafting a solid, clean and consistent papercraft object, I focused much more on getting the essentials of scoring and folding down instead of worrying about an overall concept. That being said, I knew I wanted it to relate to some experience my brothers and I used to share, as they informed the person I became a lot, for better or worse. I landed on a tophat from a game all of us used to play together called Battleblock Theatre. The game itself wasn't the significant memory (although it was a lot of fun), but it got us all together and having a good time, plus the shape of the hat lent itself well to a practice object, as it was small and symmetrical. Overall I found this experiment valuable, but I plan to go in a bigger, bolder direction for my final, now that I'm slightly more comfortable with the medium.