CAROUSEL

By Helen Macleod

When the circus came to Stornoway Helen went with a friend to see the performance. After the show Helen went home and there she came up with the idea of making a carosel. Helen wanted to use lots of different animals with different colours and patterns on them all.  She also wanted to be riding all of the animals.

When she came into the Grianan Centre the next day she told us what she wanted to do and we set about working out together how we could achieve her aims.

The first job was to photograph Helen pretending to ride an animal. Helen then put this photograph onto the computer where, using a drawing slate, she cut away the surrounding background in Photoshop. She did this so that she could later add herself to the images of all the the different animals.

Helen then looked through some resource books to find a range of different patterns that she liked and scanned all of these into the computer to use later as patterns for her animals

Helen then went on to choose the types of animals that she wanted to include in her carousel.  Using Poser ( a 3D program that has a range of ready made animals ) helen choose and posed her animals as sillouettes.  The patterns that Helen previously choose were then put into the silouettes using photoshop.

Once all of the animals had been given patterns Helen then placed the cut out pictures of herself onto the animals so that she looked like she was riding them.  She then printed the pictures and took them home to cut out.

Next Helen needed to make the poles that her animals were attached to.  Using flower canes she wrapped them in electrical tape of two different colours so that it crreated a spiral pattern on the poles.

The floor and ceiling of the carousel were next to be made.  Helen made these by making an abstract pattern in photoshop and made them into a symetrical pattern.  She then added lions and dogs as a design to the pattern.

We then chopped up the image into pieces and printed the pieces onto A4 sheets of paper.  Helen then cut out each shape and stuck the pieces together to form both ceiling and floor.  Both ceiling and floor were then stuck onto foam board and cut out.

Finally all of the separate pieces were put together, carosel roof was formed, animals stuck to poles, and poles put into carousel.  Helen then photographed and videoed her creation.

The roof of the carousel was made out of lots of triangles stuck together.  We did a test with some thin card by cutting out a triangle and using that for Helen to trace around, she then cut out the pieces and stuck them together.  When we found that this worked we went on to make the final roof.  A template triangle was made and Helen traced around it 24 times to make all of the segments of the roof.  Helen stuck all of the segments together using masking tape and the roof was finished.