Paper, Mario, and…Something Else?

This week’s Daily Creates were a blast!

I decided to try to Droodle at a meeting (or elsewhere) and ended up with this:

My doodle was…there.  The process was fairly simple: I took out my phone and set up a 15 minute timer, opened my notebook, pressed “Start” on the timer, and kept drawing lines and shading until time ran out.  I don’t doodle often, so I just started drawing geometric shapes, and not really paying attention to what I was drawing.  The horse was actually on accident, and I only completed the man’s outline because I thought it might add a bit of noir to my daily create.

My next Daily Create was focused on Making 2048:

I loved this daily create! This past summer I fell in love with Three’s, an extremely similar game to 2048. It’s the same game, but Three’s is based on, you guessed it, multiples of three, rather than 2048’s multiples of two.  I played a few other students’ versions while brainstorming for my own. Originally, I had planned to make mine based on the evolution of a soldier, but decided not to thinking small thumbnails may be in short supply.  I chose to base mine on Nintendo’s flagship video game character: Mario! I didn’t know how I wanted to have him “evolve”, at first.  I didn’t know if I wanted to do little Mario->big Mario->Fire Flower Mario, and so on, but decided that that seemed a bit too generic for my liking.  While looking at Mario images, I started to get a bit nostalgic: the first video game my older brother and I bought was Super Mario World.  So, in my rose-colored-glasses-induced state, I decided on Mario’s evolution from a wee sprite to the robust 3d model he is now.  I started searching, “Mario 1985”, “Mario 1988”, and so on, taking one plumber URL at a time, and plugging them into the 2048 generator generously provided by the daily create tweet.

My final Daily Create was to Make a paper sculpture

Ahhh the big video! I had no idea why videos were so short, and why video editing had become such a past time prior to making this sculpture creation video.  I’ll note now that I wasn’t aware that my camera had a microphone on it, or else I would have vocally narrated the entire process.  I’ve never really used paper to “make” anything other than an essay or the occasional paper football out of a restaurant napkin, so this was a bit out of my comfort zone.  I started with a simple idea—the central cone.  From there, I decided it needed a little bit of support, so I made the pillar next to it, and taped them together.  I then just started cutting a strip of paper, and realized if I could cut a central hole in it, it could be (terribly) used like a support, binding the pillar and cone together.  From there, I cut a few more strips of paper and made ribbon-like, well, ribs. (Maybe some etymology in there? I don’t know.) After securing the ribs to the pillar via scotch tape, I decided the lowest rib helped form a doorway shape between the pillar and cone, so I went ahead and attempted to make something similar to a beaded entryway.  At the time, I thought I had worked my way down from large (cone) to small (tassel-like drape), so I decided my sculpture needed a handle-ish shape.  Then, finally, an upside down hat in lieu of a cherry on top!
I should have sped up the video clip to shorten the video, but, seeing as it was my first creation process video and I rarely watch how-to videos, I’m cutting myself some slack, although I do want to apologize for wasting your time.
This was the most fun daily create for me.