I found this assignment very intriguing. To begin, I approached the project very freely, to experiment with shapes and colors and see what would happen through combining different pieces of plastic together. By the end, I was more intentional with the decisions that I made, and had visions in mind of what I wanted to create.
Inflatable #1:
For my first inflatable, I decided to experiment with different shapes, colors, and lines. I wasn’t super comfortable with using the heat sealer yet, so I mostly taped my pieces of plastic together. I soon discovered that using mostly tape meant that my inflatable would be prone to more holes, and my very free approach to creating the inflatable meant that it was difficult to find the holes in my design and cover them up. As a result, while my design ended up being a 3-dimensional object in a unique shape with lots of colors, as I had imagined, it didn’t inflate very well.
Inflatable #2:
For my second inflatable, I decided to use the heat sealer more to prevent holes, and took a more intentional approach in deciding which shapes of plastic to attach and where to attach them. I also wanted to try something a little more unique, and created four chambers of inflatables using the bottoms of colorful plastic bags, and attached them together to be in the shape of a gourd with the heat sealer. As such, to blow them up, one would need four different straws. One person could use all four straws to blow up the four chambers sequentially, or there could be a team of four people blowing together, representing teamwork and collaboration. Unfortunately, I soon realized that it was quite difficult to inflate inflatables that had plastic that was already shaped and had existing corners and edges, so inflating each of the four chambers took extra energy and they did not stay inflated for long.
Inflatable #3:
For my third inflatable, I used a different approach. In class, many of the inflatables we looked at focused more on the shape itself, rather than what was inside of them. I wanted to showcase that by creating inflatables, one could create an entire “world” or “universe” to explore within them. As such, I used clear plastic to create a trapezoidal container shape––similar to a cat carrier or a snow globe, and used colored plastic for the base. To prevent holes, I used the heat sealer to seal the pieces of plastic together. I then used tape to place a tree inside of the inflatable, and finally, used tape to create a handle, to easily carry the inflatable. When blowing up the inflatable, the end of the straw is near the top of the tree, which could represent outside air breathing life into the form inside the inflatable.
