Contraction 1

These are some shots of Contraction 1 from various angles.

Comments are appreciated.

Composition.

Due to the increased weight of the MDF elements, as opposed to cardboard, a replication of the maquette composition was pretty infeasible. At least without butchering one or two of the elements in some way, as I did, to an extent, with said maquette. Consequently I simply opted to arrange the elements in various formats which held themselves together in a stable, coherent whole until I found one which worked visually.

To give an idea of possible scale I took a trip to a local model railway shop and bought a pair of ‘citizens’ (Businessmen-‘A’) to place near the piece. That was an adventure in itself. The citizens are 1:24 scale (2 3/4″ – 3″, or 7ish centimetres, high).

After a fair amount of placement and replacement I finally found a composition that I feel works quite well, but I’ve been wrong before and I will be again.

I have to say, I’m beginning to prefer this piece without its scale citizens.

The third element. Also known as; the big one, and the orange one, as it has an orange exterior face, and the interior colour effect is orange. Spot the pattern…

Of the three elements this was the most complex. Two panels required apertures cutting and the chamfer angles required recalculating due to the elongation along one axis.

The apertures were relatively simple, using the same process as the second (yellow) element.

With this element I chose to apply some Sacred Geometry; that of the angles governing the isosceles ‘faces’ of the element (‘base’ angles 72°, apex 36°).

This meant that the equilateral panel and the short sides of the isosceles panels would have a different chamfer angle from the long sides of the isosceles panels.

Again the panels were cut and sanded back with an adequately successful result.

This element also needed the interior faces painting white for reflected colour and for an easier time applying the paint to provide said reflected colour.

At this point I suspected that there wasn’t enough internal surface area for the orange paint to provide the desired effect. I was wrong.

Yet again there was much filling and sanding and some painting with white emulsion. It’s amazing the blemishes a couple of coats of white paint will bring out. As a result there was some more filling, sanding and painting, followed by a touch of spray painting.

The third element was finished.

All that was left was to group them together in some way.

The second element. Also known as, the medium(ish) sized one, and the yellow one, as the exterior colour and interior colour effect is yellow.

A slightly more complex element than the first as there is a triangular aperture in one face. (See photograph in earlier post).

The chamfering process with this element was identical to that of the first.

The aperture necessitated cutting a section from the panel, trimming it, and then replacing the required portion and fixing it in place. Of course, there was filling to be done so that the joints would not be visible once painted

The next step was to paint what would become the interior faces of the panels white, and the one with the aperture yellow (over a couple of coats of white). The panel with the aperture provides the colour which affects the interior of this element.

All that remained was to put it together, at which point I discovered some glaring inaccuracies in my construction.

At one point the chamfered edges were not flat, but slightly concave. This meant that the panels fitted roughly together. Before I had spotted that I had trimmed one of the panels…quite a bit. Consequently, when I evened out the edges I had a substantial gap to deal with.

I solved this with a good quantity of two part epoxy filler of a marginally more solid state that car body filler.

The next step was the same as the first element, fill all the other edges and sand down. Then do it again until I was reasonably happy with the result.

Once this was done I began on the exterior paintwork. Again this was a process involving lots of white emulsion, some masking off and some spray painting.

A couple of coats of white paint brought out some imperfections that I couldn’t live with, so there was some more filling and sanding and painting. Eventually I reached a satisfactory result.

Things were definitely beginning to take shape.

At this point I began thinking that I’d not yet considered how to join all three elements when finished. Certainly I wasn’t going to arrive at a scaled up version of the cardboard maquette as gravity and much more weight now played a major role in the piece.