oh...

So yeah, I've been welding. We're doing a little bit of 'art' as she likes to call it, where we took random pieces of metal around the shop to build something using Gas welds. I'm building a car :) This is the start. It's like the 1920s ones but with some creative license, hence the random muffler; I hope to add smoke and stuff tomorrow, but it may double up as a napkin holder LOL; I was thinking of it also having utility and not just being all 'artsy fartsy'. We'll see.
The whole point is to actually get used to the materials and to understand you need to plan how things fit together, how they join and bend or it won't work. It's like my teacher was saying, when I asked him "how can all these people call themselves designers if they've never built anything"; his response was "they're not. They're stylists." It's SO true. For the last chair assignment, the front plan and side view didn't even match up, and he made sure to point out that it was a BAD drawing, possibly done by a stylist. And projects CAN be (especially in the entertainment industry; ie film) completed without stylists; I saw an AMAZING article with some of D@n B!sh0p's drawings, and the guy is good enough that he DOESN"T need illustrators at all; he's a designer and a superb draughtsman and can convey the visual content by himself.
My prof continually stresses that there is a HUGE gap between design and construction in the film industry, and sadly, my friend in architecture was telling me that this is what happened in architecture and she saw the demise in that sense (ie a bunch of 'architects' who can't get hired because their work is impractical and not useful, who then go on to complain that there is 'no work' in the industry), and that the people who have the useful skills (esp if they also have a good design sense) are worth their weight in gold. It's a detriment to the industry when we keep churning out these people who have such a disconnect to how their 'squiggly lines' will affect how something is actually built. They don't understand scale and proportion and only want to texture and render everything (even though that doesn't make a design 'better' necessarily when it is form or function based. Oh well...I really enjoy working with my hands and seeing something come to life; an idea and all that.