For my first inflatable, I started off with cutting out lots of random blue, clear, light green, and dark green pieces from the bags. I started off with the corner of one bag that I branched out of. At one point, I thought it looked kind of like a fish and the color palette was giving me ocean vibes.
I had lots of organic shapes that were kind of difficult to piece together. I used up the whole given tape roll on just half of the inflatable!
I learned from building this inflatable that it is hard to fit together pieces that are not made to fit together. Additionally, I figured out kind of how to make my own corners and points through joining together pieces in a 3-dimensional direction. This inflatable had a lot of leaks and holes that made it difficult to inflate so I also learned to repeatedly tape the bag on the outside and then turn it inside out to reinforce all the seams.
For my second inflatable, I decided to stick to some more regular shapes of mostly triangle-ish and square-ish shapes joined together.
I also learned how to use objects I had to lay the “seams” against them so that they are easier to tape.
In this inflatable, I reinforced all the seams by taping on the outside and inside. This one kept air a lot better than my first one because the edges matched together better with these shapes. I also was literally making my first inflatable on my bed so it was taped together all wrinkly, but once I had a large flat workspace, it made it a lot easier to make this inflatable a little more “crisp”. I also got a lot of practice with making these corners that I thought were really fun to make.
With my last inflatable, I decided to go with a more festive color palette. I layered yellow, orange, and pink bags on top of each other, folded them up, and cut out this diamond chain pattern to try something new out.
I joined these edges together and then at the top and bottoms, began attaching random pieces and creating new corners to create a more interesting shape.
At one section, I tried to connect a star-shaped hole together with a star face, but I learned from this inflatable that it is very hard to do that and ultimately was not very successful, but it taught me that in the future, I probably need to measure things more accurately because I was free-handing all the shapes.
I also created a pocket in one corner that I could poke the straw into so that I could secure the straw more tightly.
Overall, this assignment took me a lot longer than I thought, but it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about how 3D structures are constructed. I was proud of how much I improved from one inflatable to the next.