Water Dragon Installation
The design I ended up going with still incorporated the flowing shape of the dragon body but without the head or tail. The sculpture is in a room with a long pool running through the center, this incorporates the themes of flow and water dragons while also creating a surface that a person could see themselves in and reflect on how they create flow in their own lives.
Designing the actual model was more of a conceptual than a technical challenge. None of the shapes are particularly unique or difficult, but conceptualizing how ot create a flowing shape out of simple geometries was difficult. I designed it based on how I would bring it to fruition in real life, using a set of rings overlayed with a mesh tube that the scales could then be attached to. These rings would serve as the primary support and would be hung from the ceiling which quite frankly I forgot to picutre in my final model.
I was inspired by Chinese water dragons for my project, especially with the recent Lunar New Year, and so I wanted to make an installation that would create a contemplative space inspired by the idea of flow.
In my initial sketches I was thinking very literally with dragon iconography, but I realized that not only idd I not want to deal with rendering a dragon, but doing too literal a representation would pull waay from the reflective nature of the space.
Rendering came with it's opwn set of ridiculous challanges—as it turns out my computer doesn’t particularrly like rendering 550+ glass scales—but after a great deal of frustration and venting my best friend offered up her PC for rendering. I switched to a less reflective surface for teh scales which helped keep dimmension running and gave me more flexibility to play with things like lighting. I have a small background in lighting design so figuring out which configurations caught the light on the scales best was really fun.
Overall I’m really happy with how this project turned out. If I were to do it over I would just want more time to play around with the render .
