Making the Robot Fish - Part 2
To come up with the general style, I put together a collage of different goldfish, robot fish, and First Nations artwork for inspiration. My main goal was to highlight Jayla’s core ideas that I took note of from our interview and make simple adjustments to the other attributes of her invention. For the main body of the fish, I looked into different types of goldfish (because Jayla mentioned in our interview she drew hers like a goldfish), and found the common goldfish to be the most similar in terms of its color, the dorsal (top) fin, and body shape. I combined the aspects of the common goldfish with the aspects of the other artwork I found to model the fish body shape.
While it’s important to make the design more realistic when designing a prototype of someone’s idea like this, it’s also important to me as the designer to keep as many core features of the idea maker as possible. In this case there were many I wanted to keep, like the color and sustainability aspects noted in the first blog post. In this post I’ll go over a couple more features of Jayla’s artwork that really stood out to me to keep in the design, the eye and the style of its mouth.
The style Jayla drew the mouth in was very unique and I liked how it conveyed the “robot” aspect of her fish. For the mouth, I imported the image of Jayla’s artwork into the 3D modelling software I’m using so I could get the right size and position, then redrew it very close to the original (seen in the video). I did something similar for the eye, I really liked how Jayla drew it and wanted to preserve its style completely because it stood out to me as the most prominent feature when I first saw her artwork.
For this, I imported the image of Jayla’s robot fish eye into a graphics editor and isolated the shape of the eye, then I uploaded the image to the 3D modelling software TinkerCAD to generate the 3D model. This was a quick and easy way to make a 3D model of a simple part from a real drawing, and because the softwares used are both, free any little inventors out there can do it too!
