"Aurore:" Celebrating Marc Chagall
A collaborative, 3D wooden sculpture celebrating the works of famous painter Marc Chagall. Students formed teams of five and were tasked with choosing a painting of his to convert into a six-foot-high mobile structure. Our group chose Chagall's painting, "Aurore a Saint-Paul" (1968). A majority of Chagall's paintings heavily feature blues and cool tones, so we thought it'd be interesting to work with a piece that constrasts with many of the other sculptures.
This piece was displayed at the Dr. Phillips Center for two weeks as a part of "UCF Celebrates the Arts," an event focused on showcasing student work. My focus for "Aurore" was prop design, painting, and fabrication, as well as serving as the team researcher on Marc Chagall, his history, and the evolution of his style.
"Aurore a Saint-Paul"
Marc Chagall
1968
PROPOSAL
For your convenience:
The table of contents is listed here so that you may determine if reviewing the proposal is relevant to you. Please note: this is NOT a real proposal, but a hypothetical proposal project completed for Design Fundamentals 3D.
Additionally, the table of contents in the PDF is linked to the other pages for even more convenience.
FINAL PHOTOS
Assembly
BASE
To ensure stability, we used power tools and wood screws as opposed to wood glue to connect our base pieces. This reinforced the walls of the base, allowing it to better support the 6'6" tall sculpture and its attachments.
Though not pictured, we also needed to attach the wheels to the base during this step.
Whenever we DID use wood glue, we clamped the glued elements together overnight. (Since this class happened twice a week, it was frequently clamped for more than one night in a row).
The only element that struggled with the wood glue was:
The top
We were advised that cutting the top of our sculpture would be difficult to accomplish. However, we felt that the sculpture in its original state was too rigid; we wanted to capture the flowing, organic shapes Chagall used in "Aurore à Saint Paul."
After cutting and sanding, the biggest challenge ended up being attaching a top to the structure. No amount of wood glue would keep the foam in place; the curves were too dramatic to keep it from flinging, and there was no proper angle to clamp anything down. Eventually, we ended up stapling the top on and using wood filler to cover any gaps.
PAINTING
One of the challenges of this project was that we had to hand-mix every color we used. We were only provided black, white, red, yellow, and blue paint.
Some of the painting techniques we employed included underpainting, dry brushing, and scumbling. We used a combination of wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry blending to achieve different effects. Lastly, we took a very dark and desaturated blue with loose, fast brush strokes to capture the same look Chagall used to outline his paintings. We wanted to stay as true to his style as possible.