Places

I Gondolieri

Venice with its top

Venice is a result of my experimentations with artificial water. After making fish bowls and ponds and sunken treasure, I thought about other things with water I could depict using my three-dimensional quilling technique. Of course: Canals!

I looked at a lot of pictures of Venice to choose the color palette and design both the buildings and the cover.

I wanted the cover to represent the sky, with the sun at high noon and some clouds. I also imagined the interior light shining up through the clouds of the top.

Covered

I wanted the top to have a different profile from my other objects: not so much a bowl as a cup. The circle of loose coil “clouds” around the sun quickly extended the width while staying light. Then i switched to wider strips in the color palette I had identified, thinking of it as going from sky to earth. It originally ended at the tan, but I had miscalculated and it wasn’t wide enough, so I added the colorful orange that compliments the multi color paper of the base. For that, I cut strips from a colorfully printed origami paper. It seems to resonate with the vitality of Venice, especially during carnival.

The stand echoes the transition from sky to land of the top.

Overhead view

I imagined a gondola surrounded by the majestic buildings of the city. I did not try to replicate actual buildings, but rather to capture the essence of Venetian architecture. I also didn’t care that the water in the actual canals is a muddy green/brown. My Venice is clean and new.

Venice has a two-layer base: the colorful base you see on the outside and the cool blue concentric rings of the canal on the inside.

While this is a design choice, to have two different color effects in the base, it also conceals the wires that run from the battery in the stand up through the middle of the colorful base and out to the edges under the water base. Four chip LEDs light the buildings from within.

The base also includes the lighter loose coils I used in the top. They surround the water and support the buildings, and provide the holes through which the wires are led.

I used more of the colorful origami paper as a back wall in one building. And the corrugated roofs are wide quilling strips run through a crimper.

Venice remains one of my favorite creations.