Daisy Serebrin Final Project: Mixed Techniques

Process

At the start of the project, I wanted to make the UP house. When making the proposal, I already had an idea of what I wanted it to look like. Writing the proposal was easy, and being able to talk to others about it was helpful because other people's input made me think about other things that I wasn't thinking about. I found pictures of the house from different angles and answered all the questions in my blog post. After I got the comments back, I read them, thought about the answers, and got to work.

When I started with Fusion 360, I started by looking at the house and drawing the different shapes needed on the table with an expo marker. I also drew the dimensions I thought it would be. I didn't want it to be big. It's like 8 inches by 6-ish inches. Once that was kind of figured out, I actually started using Fusion 360. At first, it was pretty simple. I added the walls and ceilings and it seemed to be okay at first. Then using the sketch tool, I remade the ceilings so that everything would fit well together. With that done, I had to fill in the different wholes that I had because I started off with more rectangular shapes and not shapes that the house formed. With the walls and ceiling finally done, I used the sketch tool to create the floor. After the floor, everything looked good so I went to change it to be able to laser it out.

Lasering turned out to be harder than I thought because I had so many pieces to laser that would sometimes lose track of what I lasered. After lasering two sheets of 12'' x 24'' pieces of wood, I ended up having to use tape and label each piece of wood so that I knew where it went to. I also went into Fusion 360 and labeled what I had in sketches to make sure that I had everything and didn't make duplicates of something I didn't need. That took some time to do. With all my pieces lasered and labeled, it was time to put the house together.

When putting the house together, I realized everything might not have been flush against each other in fusion because some pieces were a little off but it was fixable. This took the longest time because I had to make angles and glue everything together. I started by taping everything together to see how it looked. After I glued it with wood glue. I ended up using three different types of glue for the project. I glued the sides easiest because they didn't have angles or because they were already taped well together. With those pieces glued, I had to wait for them to fully dry, and I went on the making my angles with a wood filer. This is one of the many tools I had not used before. It was very time-consuming because I was making the right front wall and with the parts that conjoined, I had to file each part separately. There were some that I over filed but hot glue fixed it at the end. After hours of a mixture of filing, electric sawing, and using a thing that was like a steel drill sander, I glued it all together with my three types of glue, wood, hot, and ultra-strong glue. Before gluing all the walls on, I did add acrylic plastic where the windows were placed by using Illustrator and adding .25 inches to my window sizes. I glued that in with ultra-strong glue. Once everything was glued together, putting the house together was done.

Next, I created my balloons. I used the form function in Fusion 360 to create the balloon shapes. I essentially created one balloon and copied it 7 times all around the one balloon. I wanted my house to fully dry overnight, so the printing happened, and the next time I came in, the balloons would be done.

When my balloons were done, I got a dowel to be able to have my balloons at a higher level than right above my chimney. I drilled a hole in my chimney and balloon so that the dowel could fit. Before fully attaching the balloons to the dowel, I painted the house and the balloons in different colors. Some were just the color of the paint given, and others were made by mixing colors together. I wish I had bought white paint because some of the colors turned out darker than I wanted but I made quite a few colors so I'm happy with that. After a few coats of paint, trying my best to paint in the lines, I added string around the dowel like balloon strings. I used the hot glue gun to glue the balloons to the dowel. To end the project attach string to the bottom of the balloons so it looked like it was fully attached to each balloon.

Result

Overall, I am very happy with the way it turned out. There are definitely things I would do differently like buying white paint and really checking that everything in Fusion 360 was lined up perfectly but that's for next time. I'm very proud of what I accomplished.

Reflection

After actually starting the project, not the proposal, I realized that making the actual house would be a struggle for me. I would say that I made a house inspired by the movie UP instead of the UP house. I thought that the easiest part was going to be putting it together because everything in Fusion 360 was finished but it was probably in the same level or higher than Fusion 360. Very time-consuming as well. In this project, I learned and used a bunch of different tools that I haven't used so that was exciting.

Pictures