3D Design- Getting Plastered

My 3D Design class only meets once a week, on Fridays from 9AM-12:40PM.  Yeah, that's a long class.  But it ends up working out fine because I get soo much done in class.  I'm missing class this week (because, once again, we'll be in Virginia, taking on ODU...you get the idea), so I had to go into the workshop today to get some things done.

Our first project for this class was to create a 17-sided figure with all planes being parallel or perpendicular and using right angles only.  We had a cube of clay to start with, and this is what I came up with:

My professor somehow counted out 17 sides to this thing.  I don't know if it really is, but whatever.  If it works for him, it works for me.

The next step was to create a larger model of the figure using foam board and duct tape.  We had to measure all the sides and multiply them to make it on a larger scale.  So here's the outcome:

This thing gave me hell.  I didn't have an Exacto knife with me, so I was bumming off of the girl next to me.  Only hers was duller than Ben Stein, so my cutting was all whacked.  Plus, trying to make a small cube to tape to the inside of a bigger cube so as to create that hole in the side of the wall was brutal.

As you can see, I've already moved onto the next step, which is cutting a hole out and filling the hollow foam piece with plaster.

It's a messy business.

This plaster better come out of my jeans...

When we were doing the plaster demo, my professor said if there's a high part of the design then you have to cut a little vent in it to allow air to move through it so the plaster will fill it up...yeah I don't know, he went on about the "laws of physics" for about fifteen minutes.  But I did what he said and cut a vent into the little blocks on top so that plaster would fill it up.  For some reason though, it didn't.

Uhh, what the hell?


So I had to make some more plaster, get my clothes even dirtier, and fill up that little section on its own.


I don't really know how it's going to turn out.  Theoretically, it should look just like my little clay mold.  But I had some trouble with the foam board, piecing everything together was a little more complicated than it seems.  Plus, since I had to fill up that block by itself, I don't know if it's going to really mold with the rest of the plaster in the other sections.  I sure hope so, because I'm not trying to go back and re-do the whole foam board thing.

**Added Note:
If you ever work with plaster, make sure to get all the plaster out from under your fingernails BEFORE it dries.  It is NOT fun or pleasant trying to dig that crap out afterward.