Aesthetic Design
Form Following Function
Our team thought long and hard about the aesthetic design. After an intense ideation session, we discovered each member of our team had very different ideas for our artistic direction ranging from classic angel to macabre skin. Instead of focusing on our differences, we decided to extrapolate what all our visions had in common. We eventually agreed upon the 'modern dark angel' aesthetic.
The main components of our aesthetic are:
- Long, stiff, uniformly sized feathers
- Exposed linkage bars to excentuate the mechanisms' elegant movement
- A color pallte consisting primarily of Black, Silver, and Dark Blue
The Feathers
The feathers are one of the most visually striking parts of the design. Because of this, we invested alot of time and effort into their design. Initially, we created paper prototypes to examine the effects wing material, binding agent, and spine material had on the overall stability. Initially we thought fabric wings with zip tie spines produced the stiffest and most visually appealing feathers but when we scaled the prototype up, the zip ties were too floppy so we switched to wire. The Feather stiffness is very important to the overall look of the wings because floppy feathers will not hold their shape.
We also experimented with feather coloring and feather fringing. We decided that the feathers looked beath smooth. The clean lines seemed to comliment our modern angel aesthetic. We decided to spray paint the top of the feathers dark blue and fade the color down the wing. A squirt of glitter spray paint was then applied giving transforming the feathers into slices of the stary night sky. This gave the wings an air of dark mystery.
