Surface Design

For this project, I drew inspiration from designs I grew up being surrounded by. 

Christmas is always a lively and colourful celebration in the Philippines. In fact, we like to spread the holiday cheer for half the year, from September to December—also called the 'Ber’ months. Seeing as we don’t have any other major national holidays after August, why not just start setting up for Christmas? We Filipinos love hosting—and attending!—big parties and gatherings, after all. From religious and secular holidays, to birthdays, coming-of-age parties or debuts, graduations, baptisms, despedidas (going-away parties), and numerous region-based street/city-wide cultural festivals, there’s hardly a month where we aren’t holding lively parties for something.

Which is what lead me to the main inspiration for my surface design--the parol. 

The parol is a traditional lantern usually seen during Christmas--a tradition dating back to the Spanish Occupation of the Philippines. These parols range from a small, simple star to big, elaborate wheels of  color, lights, and design. 

To make my own design, I also took elements from other culturally significant designs in the Philippines such as the colorful weaving of the banig, the intricate designs of the T'nalak by the T'boli--for which my hometown holds a yearly celebration for--the Philippine Flag, and the Bahay Kubo.

Making the design on Rhino using the curve tools wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. The shape I struggled with the most were the rays on the suns, and the swirls in the circles between each spoke of the stars. At first, I thought using circle, offset, and trim would be the best way to go about it, but I eventually came to use arcs to make one ray and using array polar.

 

The hatching process was also a lot less tedious than I thought it would be, since my design repeats a lot of elements, I simply colored one element in and used rotate-copy with varying o-snaps enabled to be more efficient. Now, I wanted to evoke the fun and lively atmosphere of Christmas back home, so I went with a couple of color palettes. Because of how many colours were involved, I had a hard time pinning a final look down. It took a couple of tries, showing friends and family the design, until I came up with the combination that seemed to get the most approval.

Rejected Colors 1

Rejected Colors 2

Overall, this project was incredibly fun and enlightening to do. I never considered using a 3D CAD software to make 2D designs, normally I'd default to illustrator or photoshop. But making this in Rhino was actually way better than if I had done it in illustrator. I had a lot more freedom to explore and experiment with different shapes plus, the rotate-copy tool is honestly the GOAT. I'm only a few weeks into learning Rhino but I think that might be my favorite tool so far because of how ridiculously useful it is.