Upcycle Project Progress: Wood-metal sculptures

After a frustrating brainstorming session over the weekend, I ended up making almost no progress. Hence, I decided to go ahead and build something out of discarded foam boards which I found in my RA resource room in my residence hall. I thought it would be sweet if I could build a whole arsenal of Batman gadgets out of  foam boards, starting with some sweet Batarangs that could go in my dorm room. While raiding the junk in the room, I stumbled upon a discarded heat sink that had some interesting patterns formed by the cooling fins that I really wanted to use for my project. ( I also liked how the most optimal engineering design, had some artistic appeal as well!) That’s when I my project took a hard turn.

Rouge heat-sink in the trash pile.

I found a bunch of crafting wood sticks that I thought would go well with the metal parts as I am a fan of contrast. I started ideating as to how I could use the grooves to my advantage and came up with a couple of designs, one using the groves to facilitate the wood sticks in some way and the other to bring out the groves as an aesthetic element on it’s own. luckily I found another heat sink and thought to myself that this was an opportunity to execute both Ideas.

The second heat sink that I salvaged.

I had set myself a deadline to have something tangible by the end of the night to prevent myself from getting overwhelmed with ideas, so I found a glue gun and started gluing sticks into the grooves, as I aimlessly glued more sticks into the groves, I figured that I was subconsciously heading towards making a creature of some sort. I still need to add a ‘face’ to it.

A hexapod bug-like creature that I ended up with.

I left my design here and pursued the idea of using the grooves as it is, gluing the sticking the sticks in a vertical dimension. I ended up with a “Mecha-Bonsai” like aesthetic as shown below.

This is what I call ‘Mecha-Bonsai’

I am excited to see where this takes me, and am open to your suggestions! I also realized that my creative process involves taking a leap of faith and relaxing my mind, which definitely makes more receptive to ideas.

Previous Post
Upcycling Update
Next Post
07 Sketching a block, and team behavior

2 Comments. Leave new

  • Gautham Govindarajan
    February 6, 2017 12:01 am

    Hi Ridhvik. Really like the Mecha-Bonsai idea. Lot’s of possibilities with the materials you have. Did you consider may be coming up with an outer structure for the bonsai rather than just making a random shape?

    Reply
  • Alexander Lien
    February 5, 2017 11:37 pm

    I think it’s great you already have some work underway. Seeing visuals made it very easy to understand your writing, I think the use of visuals helped the article read clearly. Excited to see what you end up with!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.