3D Design is not something that is in my usual wheelhouse. When I told my SCAD Professor this during a one-on-one critique, she responded with, “Good. I’m glad it’s not familiar to you.”

Something that has been a struggle for me as an artist is pushing myself. As a perfectionist, I tend to naturally keep things as safe as possible to avoid ruining them. But in the past six months that I have been at SCAD, I’ve been pushing myself more and more out of my comfort zone. (I have to credit all of my incredible professors here for constantly pushing me to be better than what I even think I am capable of.)

But when I got the assignment for this project - one where each student had to create a sculpture out of cardboard based on a sound, I was definitely stuck at first. As a graphic designer, working in 3D is harder for me to wrap my brain around than my usual 2D projects.

My first few ideas seemed way too safe. I sketched a few different options, but all of them were put to shame when my professor showed us some student examples from previous classes. I knew I had to step it up.

After creating a mini maquette version of my sculpture, I began to get more comfortable with the project scope. I could finally start to really process my audio and imagine it as a 3-dimensional abstract piece. The audio I chose to work with was the sound of a mallet game at a carnival, where you hit the hammer as hard as you can, and try to get the bell to ring. My audio was initially inspired by Caraval by Stephanie Garber, and therefore I thought of carnivals and festivals, and then came the idea to use the sound of that particular game.

I still knew my maquette wasn’t good enough, though. Since my first quarter here at SCAD, I’ve been constantly telling me to push myself. My professor told the class to think about how we could exaggerate our sculptures. So, I made mine much bigger than my maquette.

I added negative space. I added height. I swapped the colors. I added more pins and nails for texture. My final sculpture ended up being 24x8x12 inches compared to my 6 inch maquette.

The sound of the High Striker mallet game sounded very balanced to me. You have the sound of the hammer hitting down, the sound going up to the bell, the bell going off, coming back down, and hitting the bottom again. So, I chose to make my piece symmetrical. The first and last sound were deeper, so I had the ends of my sculpture go downward (a.k.a. deeper) and I placed thick screws here. I added steps with negative space below them for the second and fourth sounds of the traveling before and after the bell. The steps represented the up and down. And I created a tower of cardboard circles for the middle sound - the bell. I added thin nails to the top to represent the lighter sound of the bell compared to the hammer.

These pins were arranged in a spiral, and I chose to paint my final sculpture in black and white. Since my piece was originally inspired by Garber’s Caraval - which is something of a circus or a carnival, but with illusions and madness - I decided to play on the illusion aspect with this.

Overall, this having been my first time working on a project like this, I am pretty pleased with how it turned out. I am super grateful for all of the opportunities I have at SCAD to grow and push myself and my art. I learned a lot with this project specifically about getting out of my comfort zone and just creating. And I also learned that cutting a million circles out of cardboard takes a LOT longer than you think.