Zach✅ Completed Piece
🤔 Inspiration
One of the goals of this piece was to create color gradients across the neighboring faces, which would give the piece a varied appearance from different angles. This corner was the intended home for this piece, so i was able to go in knowing that it didn't need to be totally perfect because the practical viewing distance would ideally obscure most of the minor construction issues as detailed below.
🎨 Design
In an attempt to simplify as many of the measurements as possible, I began by subdividing the 24" and 36" evenly, then introduced a few further subdivisions to try to develop a bit of a more random appearance, so that the underlying grid used wouldn't be readily evident in the finished piece.
In developing the triangle locations I was trying to go for something similar to the inspiration piece. The inspiration piece has very few triangles, but the faces work together really effectively to create a sense of depth and continuity, while providing interesting color gradation via light and shadow. It turned out to be a great choice to keep the number of triangles as low as possible because measuring and cutting each triangle accurately turned out to be a time consuming learning process.
Again, to make measurements as simple as possible, I made all peaks and valleys exactly 0", 1", 2", or 3" tall.
🛠️ Preparation
I tried a number of different glues, but found that the Loctite was by far the best. the protractor was invaluable when it came to ensuring that all the edges actually lined up exactly as necessary. I probably cut about half of the pieces twice, even after having measured everything in SketchUp. The problems came from a number of places, but the protractor really helped to measure exact angles across the fastened sub-structure on the actual board. I used two 30"x42"x0.125" foam core boards to cut, and re-cut all the structure and faces.
I began by tracing out the grid that was the basis for all the structural placement. Going into this, I didn't know what the best way to build the underlying structure to hold the faces would be. This was the first successful experiment, using a few strategically placed pieces of scotch tape alone. no glue or rubber cement on those two pieces.
🚜 Building
This was after I had cut and tested a number of structural and facial pieces based mostly on the SketchUp design measurements. However, I hadn't actually fastened the facial pieces into place atop the structure and this turned out to be one of the reasons that I had to re-cut a few of the facial pieces.
Only some of the structural pieces had been affixed at this point. i was still relying on all the measurements of lengths and angles from SketchUp.
Finally began to fasten the facial pieces to the structure. This was where I learned that Loctite Professional Super Glue was by far the best choice for the fastening the face to the structure, among the various glues and rubber cement I had tried.
It's pretty hard to see here, but there's a piece of tape placed longways on each of the vertical structure elements, and another piece of tape at the joint between them, holding the two together. Placing the tape to really hold the structural pieces in place turned out to be an art form as well, but luckily the dirt and mess didn't matter since they wouldn't be seen.
I probably re-cut more than half of the pieces, and eventually began just over-cutting most pieces to enabling shaving them to fit where necessary. Shaving the foamcore required about 5 exacto blades over the course of the project, to ensure super smooth edges.
The initial plan was that the neighboring facial triangles should each share the surface of their supporting elements. This worked in a lot of places, but in some cases because of poor measurement, or bad structural placement, I added additional structural pieces to help provide more surface area for the glue to bind the faces to the top of the structure.
These were just a fraction of the shavings that were created while over-cutting many of the re-cut the pieces in order to place them over the structure and refine as necessary to achieve the best fit possible.
I tried to cut most of the larger pieces first, to keep the longest edges left on the remaining material.
Everything in this shot has been fastened. It highlights a few of the different kinds of underlying imperfections.
After placing it on the wall in its final resting place, Maria suggested that it needed something to accent the side of it to fit in better with other pieces in the same room. Luckily, I also had some black-backed 1/8" foam core as well, and lined up this side strip along the side. It really did add the perfect accent to help it fit into the room. I also skipped the step where I drilled a hole, centered in the backing piece of foam core to rest it on a single screw.
As you can see, up close there a lot of imperfections in the seams. However, because of the placement of the piece, in the corner with limited close-up access, most viewing is further away where the its able to conceal the imperfections better. You can see things like slight misalignments, a few accidental glue spots at the seams, and some seams being larger than others.
Taking a couple steps back helps to hide a number of the details. Most viewing happens a few more steps away anyway. Altogether, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Even though it has some imperfections, I re-cut enough of these pieces that it wasn't worth it to try to fix every little thing, especially given its location, and that the details rarely present themselves from a distance.