Images of the Final Product

This our completed resort. In the last lesson, we made a few final improvements to a couple of different aspects of the resort, like the cabins, dirt and trees, and attached the waterwheel. To do this we used the wire from a pipe cleaner. This involved taking all of the fluff off the pipe cleaner, which took quite a while, but there wasn't any other material we could see that would look as good or work well. It fit well through the center of the wheel and was very easy to bend into shape and glue to the mountain.

I am very happy with how the resort turned out and had a lot of fun making it. Overall, we didn't have many problems creating the resort, and any that we did have were easy to fix. I think that it has come together nicely and looks fairly realistic. All we have left to do in this task is the oral on Friday, but we have already written that so we only have to complete the PowerPoint.

Resort Progress

In the last couple of lessons there has been a lot of progress on our resort. After the paint on the mountain dried we dabbed grey and green paint over parts of it with a sponge, mostly around the sides and the waterfall. We didn't have any white paint left after the grey so the green is very bright but it doesn't matter too much.

In the last lesson Shae covered the ground at the base of the mountain with fake dirt using glue while I made some final improvements to the design of the cabins. I glued four small wooden sticks that were about 1cm wide, 2cm tall and about 1mm thick around the lower storey. There is one in each corner next to the wall, and two in the corner of the window walls. These were put there to support the roof and to make the cabins more detailed. I only completed three of the four cabins in this lesson, but they didn't take very long to do so I should complete them fairly easily. I haven't taken any photos of this yet but I will hopefully upload some tomorrow.

In today's lesson we glued on the trees at the base of the mountain, made the water wheel, and made the water. We made the water at the base of the waterfall lighter than that at the top so that it would look more natural and hopefully flow better. To make the waterfall we poured the glue at the top of the mountain and let it flow down into the lake below so that it would follow the path that water would naturally take, making it look more real. Photos of this will also be uploaded along with the cabins.

We have almost finished our resort and will make the last few changes in our last lesson tomorrow. All we need to do is make some slight changes to one of the cabins, finish gluing on the trees and attached the water wheel and cabins to the mountain. This shouldn't take too long to do, and if we need to we can finish it in lunch.

Since my last post our resort has progressed nicely. Shae was away for two lessons so I finished plastering our mountain and began measuring and cutting out the cabins in this time. After Shae returned we decided to only make the cabins one storey because it would be difficult to make them the way we had planned. After we made one cabin like this we decided it seemed too plain and low, and so we added a second storey but in a different way to our original design. An image of a semi-completed cabin can be seen below. We are planning on attaching clear plastic to the front and side walls of the cabins to symbolise the glass, but if this doesn't work we will probably just leave it as it is.



We have also begun painting the mountain. We decided it would be better to paint it before doing the waterfall so we could have the paint going right up to the edge of the lake without having the risk of it getting on the water. It is going to be predominantly brown, with grey around the sides and where the waterfall/lake is. There will also be some green around the top and sides of the mountain. The current mountain can be seen below:

Mountain

In the lesson today, Shae was away and I didn't want to make too many changes without her. I found some new plaster though, so I was able to finish plastering the sides of the mountain and fill up any holes. I also made it a bit less neat so that it would look more natural, instead of being really smooth. Hopefully Shae will be back in the next lesson because I'm not sure what we want to do from here.

Starting the Resort

It has been a week since we began making our resort, and so far everything has run smoothly. Our only problem was that our lake was too wide so the router wouldn't have been able to balance on the edges. To fix this we simply made the lake slightly narrower. Since then, we have made the mountain that the cabins are going to sit on using newspaper, chicken wire and plaster of Paris. Unfortunately we ran out of plaster before we could cover the back and sides and couldn't find any more, but hopefully this won't matter, and if it does we can always cover it later.

Design Changes

In our last lesson, Shae and I changed a lot of things in our design. In the cabins, we have decided to have the top storey leaning off the other side so that it will provide shade for the windows. Our resort is not going to be set in a particularly cold place; so more effort is being placed on cooling than heating. The windows will still be facing north-east or north-west, so sun can still heat the rooms during winter, and during summer the wood sunshades and the top storey can shade the windows.

We have also changed parts of the layout of our resort. We have decided to not include the mountain that was going to be in the top right corner, and have instead made the main cliff where the cabins will be bigger so that it covers most of the top half of the design. This was done so that we could make the cabins slightly bigger so that we could include more detail, while still focusing on the landscape to a certain extent.
This is an image of our new resort design:

Ideation

In our last lesson Shae and I finished drawing up our plan for the landscape and cabins in our resort. All ideas for the cabin design that were discussed in my last blog post are remaining the same, with a few additions. Our current design for the cabins can be seen below.


We have decided to make the cabins two storey, with a balcony hanging over the front and one of the sides. We have done this mostly for aesthetic purposes, although the balcony will slightly shield the front windows from the sun. We may choose to shift the top storey to the other side so that it can also shade the windows on the side of the building, but we are not sure of this yet. We are planning on making parts of the cabins out of bamboo, for instance the railings on the balcony and possibly the sliding shades for the windows, as it is very renewable and strong. We are not sure on most of the rest of the materials yet.

As we wanted to focus on the landscape as well as the design of the cabins, our resort model is going to be on a slightly smaller scale than most of the others. This is our design so far, with the rectangles symbolising the cabins: