Still light Week 1 and 2

My new project 'Still Light' began with researching and creating a mood board on Pinterest of my given person who was Charlie Brown. By creating a mood board of Charlie Brown, I was able to pick out the different colours and shapes that relate to him such as yellow and black and the signature zig zag on Charlies t-shirt. The overall mood I felt when looking at my completed mood board was mellow and relaxed and this is the feel I wanted my final outcome to give.

After my research, I moved on to experimentation. As I had never worked with light before I wanted to explore the different ways in which light can work within 3D forms. I created a number of 3D forms and placed a LED light strip in them. I created different random shapes so that I had a variety of different forms to explore and experiment with. At this stage my design and ideas were diverse and spontaneous, some of my designs were rather abstract and I felt like the shapes I used in these designs fitted in well with the theme that I was going for. Something I found difficult during this process was creating a form that would hide the light source and give a clean and immaculate final outcome.

After testing my initial ideas with the LED light, I narrowed my ideas down. I really liked how the triangular structure worked as a body for my lamp. The light bounced off well on all corners and gave off a nice beam of light. I decided that I wanted the main design of the lamp to be the zig zag on Charlie’s t-shirt and I wanted my lamp to be a desk lamp. I wanted it to be aimed towards children and comic nerds so I had to keep my design funky and fresh.

I began to test out some of my designs to see how they would work. The first design I tested out was a sphere made from wire with a zig zag hanging from the middle which would be the light source. Once I finished making this model, I decided I didn’t really like it, it didn’t work as a desk lamp and reminded me too much of a globe and the design wasn’t very stable. 

I then created another design, this one was formed of three long triangle prisms to form a triangle, this design was very abstract and unique and I felt like it worked really well so I decided to develop upon this design.

To make my design relate to Charlie Brown, I wanted my lamp to have a strong graphic touch to it, so I decided to create the triangle prisms out of clear acetate and border it with a thick black tape. I feel like this worked really well. The clear acetate gave the design a minimalist touch.

Overall I was pleased with my final outcome, It looked interesting and fitted in with the theme I going for. However something I would improve about my design would be making sure that the light source was hidden away and not visible so that the final lamp looks immaculate and not messy.