To celebrate our Cohort moving out of transition and into year nine we participated in the Illuminate Festival. It was a collaboration of all Project X classes (dance, drama, music, media, and visual arts) to showcase our talents to our parents and teachers, each class had to present something during the festival.
I was a part of the visual Arts class, we made a hybrid mythical creature-themed pinata over the course of a semester however to make the process quicker we made them in Pairs. This project was inspired by Roberto Benavidez pinata sculptures he makes, and he was inspired by the painting “The Garden Of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch which depicted lots of hybrid mythical creatures
The Design Process
We spent a period collecting photos of different mythical hybrid creatures together to use as our inspiration for the pinata. We each drew 4 hybrid mythical animal designs using a few of our selected photos, the drawings were only a draft and didn’t have to be completely finished as that would waste time. After another hour we came together in pairs to come up with a final
design, when we were happy with the final design we worked by ourselves again to decide on two different color palettes and we then collaborated together to decide on a final color scheme to go with the final design. When we were happy with everything we submitted an outline of our design to laser cut out of A2-sized cardboard to use as the sides of our Pinata.
The next part of the pinata-making process was the most tedious and boring bit. We had to tape the cardboard outlines to the outside of the cardboard strips to create a 3d silhouette from the side view. This part took a long time because of the design’s corners and tight curves, the cardboard you tape between the two pieces of cardboard has to be perfectly straight and in line with the outline when you tape it, overall it took about eight periods to do. We taped a small strip of rope on the top of the pinata’s head so we could carry it and cut a flap at the bottom of the pinata so we could store and hide the batteries for all of the lightings.
The final part came and it was really fun, we got to glue all the tiny pieces of paper onto the framework of the pinata, it was fun to do since it was a relaxing and slow process where we got to work in our pairs, there were different ways to cut the paper, choices on how to glue it on and then deciding what the best way to join the colours together. Then we go to paint the strip of cardboard holding the two sides together, we got to choose from neon pink, green, yellow, gold, silver, and blue, and we decided on the gold as the other colours didn’t match our colour palette. We
hot-glued a string of pom poms all the way around the outlines of the cardboard by adding dots of hot glue spaced around the edge of the cardboard and attaching the pom poms to it. To stop the lights from coming off we wrapped the string around two pom poms and glued the string under the third pom pom, this became a bit annoying since the string of lights we were using was 10 metres long and you couldn’t cut any access off otherwise all the lights stopped working. After the lights were done we were finally finished making the Pinata, we called her “Luna the Floofball”.
Presenting the Pinatas
It was the most stressful yet rewarding part of the semester, behind backstage everyone was nervous and anxious. When we walked onstage with the pinata we held them in the light and then in the darkness with the pinata lights on. I get stage fright easily so I calmed down when the lights were turned off because it meant we didn’t have to see their faces watching us, It was so rewarding when the room went dark and you could hear all the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’. When we finished our presentation we split into two groups each taking half of the crowd. For the rest of the day, we walked around barefoot showing the parents around
