Collaboration - Beastly Designs

During my collaboration project I was assigned partners with Will Niven whose specialisms include  Graphics and Architecture. We had to coe up with a proposal for our project based on Beastly Designs and our client was The Museum of Design in Plastics. My initial thought was to create a neck-piece make from perspex and the laser cut machine as I wanted to try different materials and techniques I had never tired before. My partner agreed with my idea and began planning. After a week of research we came up with the idea of creating a neck-piece that would glow in the dark to reflect the nocturnal habitat of an armadillo and meet the criteria of 'Beastly Designs'. My role was to design and photograph the necklace and it was Will's job to create an illustrator file of the necklace to be cut in the laser cut machine. Below I have taken self portraits and scratched the photographs to show my initial designs.

Here is my final neck-piece made from acrylic perspex. If we had more time or money to buy glow in the dark perspex and decide on more suitable colours I think the outcome would be more appealing. However we had to compromise with the materials that were available to us. Each armadillo band is attached to the neckline piece by rivets in order to adjust imitating the flexible shell of an armadillo. The two neck-pieces can be worn separately however in the photograph below they are layered to show the possibilities.  

It was hard to capture the nocturnal essence of this project as I had to experiment with various ways of creating light photography - something I had never done before. After several experimental shots I found that by turning the lights off and using only a torch to view the model, the background was darkened leaving a glow on the neck-piece from the torch light. Below are two of my most successful shots. 

For this image I experimented with shaking the torch to create a ghostly effect. 

As this was a live project for the Museum of Design in Plastics our neck-piece was chosen to form part of a group exhibtion. This was such a huge achievement for us and we are very pleased with the outcome. Our work is currently being exhibited as shown below.