Weekly Progress Update

A big chunk of progress has been made since the last update! Some BTS updates that weren’t properly photographed: the bookpress worked perfectly for flattening my paper. So my orange and sweet potato papers were ready to be printed on, along with the title page, when that gets done!

On Monday, I started another Tinkercad project and made two Sumo Orange 3D plates. One is the whole orange, and the other is sliced down the middle. Something I noticed is that every time I add my stuff to TinkerCad, I worry it’s not fully encapsulating my vision from my Procreate drawings to TinkerCad. But I'm always surprised by how well they print when I actually put ink on the plates, which is good! It’s just a brief panic and worry that I have to redraw my drawings and add them back to TinkerCad.

3D printing the plates went smoothly, but the printing went a little differently than I originally imagined. Thankfully, there was no measurement mishap like the last prints. When printing the sumo oranges, I imagined the associated text of the Temple writing to be “Tough exterior / Learned Thickness.” So I wanted to print the two orange plates together, overlapping.

However, when I returned on Tuesday and was drawing sketches for my sweet potato and edamame, I realized, “Which line is the sweet potato?”

Temple (for reference and reminder):

Filling the space / While my core starves

Tough exterior / Learned thickness

Ripping past the seams / Cold, plush, flesh / Finally freed

It wouldn’t have made sense to put sweet potato for “cold, plush, flesh” as the other two lines of the stanza were meant for the edamame. It made sense to switch sweet potato to “tough exterior/ learned thickness” and “cold, plush, flesh” to be the orange. However, the new problem was that the overlapping of the double oranges didn’t seem fitting for that line. Which meant I had to reprint the oranges, and instead of both of them, I just printed the sumo orange, sliced directly down the middle. While the reprinting didn’t take long (maybe 30 minutes max, including cleanup), it did take time away from other progress.

Later on Tuesday, I finished drawing sketches for the sweet potato and was ready to take it to TinkerCad. However, the original design was two variations of sweet potato, one for my thigh and the other for my calf. So far, not to jinx it, the calf potato was giving me the hardest time in TinkerCad. I will admit, I did my steps out of order. Usually, I design the base, then the design, and if the design has “holes” or “pockets,” they’re the last to go in. Instead, I started with the design first, maybe because I was really excited! The main issue it was causing was that the “holes” part of the design wouldn’t fit inside the design. It kept going above (where that would be the part that would get inked instead), or it would try to go underneath the base. This forced me to restart the 3D plate… and go in the correct order. As I was redoing the calf potato, however, I kept looking over at my thigh potato, and I wasn’t feeling it anymore. I felt as if I overdid my imagery on my thighs, and I wanted to try to include other body parts reimagined as fruit/vegetables. So I decided the alternative would be to double-print the calf potato in opposite directions after the 3D printing process.

Once I finished in TinkerCad on Wednesday, I 3D-printed the sweet potato plate, did my edamame sketches, and added them to TinkerCad. Meaning after the edamame is printed, I only have to design the title page plate, and then the rest is just doing the typeface, which should, in theory, move quickly! Fingers crossed, though, haha.

Lastly, on Thursday, I 3D-printed the edamame plate and inked/printed the sweet potato, which turned out super good! Since I don’t have the edamame paper ready, after class, I walked to Safeway and picked up some frozen edamame. Semi-off topic and unimportant, I’m thinking of making this salad I saw on Pinterest, which was corn and edamame with Greek yogurt and other fillings. Allowing me to use the skins as paper. Since they’re also being steamed and the skin is generally thin, I’m hoping they stay soft enough tomorrow for me to make paper. Instead of doing the process last week, with drying the orange skins and then boiling them before making paper.

Before Tuesday, I’m hoping to complete the following:

1. Drawing, designing, and 3D-printing my title page

2. Making edamame paper

3. Printing edamame

4. Printing title page