Tag: anna arsiriy

Kitchens: Good Memories and Healthy History

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

Intro

Growing up, the kitchen was a place where my mom and I connected. Kitchen was the place where I used to eat breakfast every day before going to school. At the end of the day, we ate dinner and drank a cup of tea sitting at the tiny dining table. Our kitchen was tiny but it made great family memories. There is just something about being in the kitchen that makes the world a better place. When I’m in the kitchen all the worries of the day disappear.

Useful info

The crucial point I would like to make is that kitchens are bacteria hotspots, and if not kept in a good state of cleanliness, can be harmful for people. Many people believe that kitchen interior color choice should be anything but white since white shows all possible spots, dust and dirt. Besides, it is probably the most frequently visited place in the whole house. However, I would go opposite – make it white and see how clean and fresh your kitchen looks. And again, it is not just my personal preference. John Riha, who has written seven books on home improvement, claims that white kitchen has a healthy history:

Roll back a few years to get a handle on white’s popularity. In the 1920s and ‘30s, white was about the only color offered by manufacturers. To paraphrase Henry Ford, you could have your choice of any color at all, as long as it was white.

That made sense. White was associated with sanitation and health, and to a population not far removed from a deadly worldwide flu epidemic, household cleanliness was all-important.

Times have changed, but white’s healthy glow endures. Dirt just can’t hide in an all-white kitchen. (www.houselogic.com)

He also points out that white is affordable color: “And because it’s a standard color for any manufacturer, it’s your ally: You’ll find white cabinets, tile, counters, faucets, sinks, and appliances to fit any budget”. Besides, white kitchens create even bigger visual space. So altogether, it is a lot of pros in white.

Solution

This picture is the source of my inspiration which is taken from v-boos.ru – the website of Russian interior designer Vera Boos.

The kitchen in my house model is a spacious functional place which is used not only for cooking and preparing food, but also for frequent family gatherings. I want to make sure that it has plenty of space for the families with more than 1 or 2 kids. It has a kitchen island which functions as an additional surface for cooking and the table for the quick family meals (like breakfasts). It has a big window in front of the sink, french doors (backyard entrance), and lots of lighting. It also has built-in appliances, and lots of kitchen cabinets for storing. Cabinets should be high gloss white combined with elegant wooden gloss (unfortunately, SketchUp cannot show this kind of reflective surfaces).

REFERENCES

Riha, John. “Why White Kitchens Stand the Test of Time.” Houselogic, HouseLogic, 14 Dec. 2017, www.houselogic.com/by-room/kitchen/why-white-kitchens-stand-test-time/.

Boos, Vera. “FavoHouse.” VBOOS, v-boos.ru/wp/2017/02/15/favohouse/.

Dreaming in White in a Dream Master Bedroom

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

Intro

When it comes to home decor and bedroom styling I think it’s the best if the room presents clean, fresh atmosphere and provide a good air flow. My personal experience tells me that the bedroom is the most intimate and relaxing spot in the house. It is extremely important that my bedroom space corresponds to my mood. The master bedroom interior should be rather the place where people can blank their minds and forget about their daily routine. Whether a person shares his/her bed with the partner or does not, there should not be any mental activities as people go to the bed. Relaxation, pleasure, and refreshing are the things coming in my mind when I think about going to the bed. And therefore, a suitable bedroom interior should help us to shut the brain down and turn our unconscious self on. That’s when dreams come to the play.

 

Some Things to Think About Before Getting Started

According to www.psychologytoday.com,

We spend our days gathering information, some of it we would like to keep, most of it we need to discard. If we do not clear out our mental storage space regularly we risk saturating our brain with too much useless trivia. In order to fully process this information, we need to shut our brain down; disconnect it entirely from the outside world.

While scientists still do not know much about why or how we dream, an interior designer’s concern is to make sure that people spend a third of their lives sleeping being in a comfortable pleasing atmosphere. And the color choice is the first thing an interior designer should think of while making the master bedroom interior for dreaming and not for sleeping.

For me, the choice is obvious. A white on white room is timeless. And it’s not just a personal preference. White color is both blank and rich, it fills mind and space at the same time. It symbolizes purity, goodness, heaven, light, innocence and spirituality. It is a perfect color for relaxing, emptying the mind and diving right into the dream world. Pizzetti Design says

White interiors can bring you peace, tranquility, relax, but also, with the right pop of colors and contrast, they easily become versatile, alive, energetic. Not to mention that they make the room look bigger, spacious and airy.

 

Even though white itself is a pretty complete color, I agree that adding some spots of bright color can’t hurt. Especially if combined with simplified geometric shapes and lines, it makes an amazing effect of spaciousness in the bedroom.

 

Solution

Elegancy of my master bedroom contemporary interior design is in color choice (white with some accents of rich deep purple), simple shapes, functionality and spaciousness. All together it is a design in minimalist geometric style. Furniture, including the bed, shelves, and desk, are designed to create interesting negative open spaces. There is no nightstands next to the bed since it stands on the horizontal shelf units which function as both nightstands and bed pedestal. The master bedroom has a walk-in-closet and master bathroom (not yet completed).

I used SketchUp Pro 2018 to complete the sketch of my idea, as well as a lot of pencil/charcoal on paper.

 

 

REFERENCES

Wenk, Gary L. “Sleep and Dreams.” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 7 Feb. 2011, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/your-brain-food/201102/sleep-and-dreams.

Posted on March 26, 2014 at 7:20 am. Written by Pizzetti Design. “Dreaming in White: 10 Stunning White Interiors.” PIZZETTI DESIGN, 8 July 2014, www.pizzettidesign.com/dreaming-in-white-10-stunning-white-interiors/

Scott, Elaine, and John O’Brien. i.pinimg.com/originals/1b/bb/2f/1bbb2ffdb2552f729e9b13b1785e91f7.jpg.

Floor Plans Sketches

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

These are the sketches of the floor plans I made completely from the scratch. Some of the room dims will probably be changed as I go deeper into the design process.

 

These are the screenshots of the first floor plans made in AutoCAD 2017. (I probably have tons of technical drawing mistakes since I’m still new to these concepts… so please don’t be too hard on me.)


Thesis Statement

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

Interior design is a very broad field which embraces a great deal about art, culture, social tastes, lifestyle choices, and more. It involves everything from the planning and organization of space and lighting to the selection of materials, textures, furniture and accessories. In most cases, modern interior design modeling is based on both 2D (image) and 3D (space) modeling in frames of a very limited real estate. Functional approach based on economy and convenience became key points. Thus, the first step for an artist (interior designer) is to create a successful 3D interior model which will be as much functional and convenient, as aesthetically pleasing.

Power to the People

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

– Bruce Mau

In response to Manifesto of An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by Bruce Mau

This manifesto by Bruce Mau has to be one of the best manifestos I have ever read. It is super easy to understand and get inspired by. Being a designer, Mau embraces a new way of thinking about design, and perhaps life in general. Not only it can be applied to design, but I think to the majority of other professional fields and business too.

 Slow down.

Forget about good.

Don’t be cool.

Ask stupid questions.

These are four things that may seem pretty confusing and unmotivated at the first glance. But they are opposite. “Don’t be cool” is my favorite out of these four. “Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort” – isn’t it genius? Why are we always trying to be cool? I think staying ourselves – that’s what makes us being real cool. WE LEARN by asking stupid questions, slowing down, making bad experiments, breaking and crushing, which is non-replaceable experience in our lives.

Allow events to change you.

Begin anywhere.

Keep moving.

Think with your mind. Forget technology.

Explore the other edge.

Power to the people.

I think it’s so powerful I am about to print it out, frame it, and put it on my desk. These simple things should be always reminded of. Moreover, this list should be open so each person can add to it and get the most out of it.

Afterword

Anna ArsiriyART 415 Interior Design

In response to the reading, Foreword by William Cromar.

According to Picasso, computers are useless because they can only give answers. Michael Noll proved that in the era of digital discoveries computers can be used not only to answer, but also to ask. But when it comes to art, I think we should consider everything that is left behind the scene. Digital art, as art in general, should be described as an idea rather than computer generated set of effects. Gaussian Quadratic represents the idea, and not the image of ninety-nine lines connected in 100 points whose horizontal coordinates are Gaussian.

A. Michael Noll, Gaussian Quadratic, 1962

If “Duchamp killed the boundaries that divided disciplines” of academic art (painting, sculpture, etc.), why can’t we destroy the boundaries that divide disciplines of digital art?

image — space

 ╲       ╱

 time

Everything relates to each other, and at the same time everything is based on each other in a digital world: 3D (space) is based on 2D (image), whereas 4D (time) is based on 3D, etc. Cromar sets an example: “video projection on a wall shares aspects of time and image, but projection onto the floor (wherein an audience can walk around or into the work) incorporates the aspect of space”. That said, my conclusion is that all boundaries and absolute freedom are established or killed by us, artists.

Project 3 | Possible World

Anna ArsiriyART 314

 

 

Since I consider interior design as one of the possible future career paths I wanted to connect this project with designing an interior.  My Possible World focuses on the creation of a small immersive environment such as an interior design of my living room. I decided to start with not so much of designing but copying an existing room in my house. Of course, the environment is simplified and many objects have similar but not the same structure (such as piano, spiral staircase).

Here is the picture of my living room vs. the rendered Maya image.

DCIM102GOPROG1935647.

In Maya, I modeled the environment and its materials, textures, lighting and movement of a camera through space. First part of the project was to create an environment. The material and textures include laminate, wood (piano, coffee table, stairs, plant), carpet, leather and others. Doors and windows with blinds are png images inserted into the walls. I learned how to use bump mapping to create a realistic textures of leather and carpet.

Bump mapping of leather texture(alpha gain = 0.1, picture with inverted in Photohop colors)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bump mapping of carpet texture (alpha gain = 0.8)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second part was to create a simple rigged entity. In my case, it is a butterfly. Even though I learned how to use Blend Shapes, I used Expression Editor (Windows->Animation Editors->Expression Editor) for rigging the wings.

Left wing (I played around with each wing separately).

Note: These functions are made only after creating additional attributes in the Channel Box (Edit -> Add Attribute) , such as in my case Wiggle, WingSpan, and CycleTime.

math function = sin

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Right wing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first couple of seconds of the animation shows randomized motion of the butterfly which is also done using Expression Editor.

random function = noise

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the light, I used one light source – point light with intensity 1000 and retrace shadows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After organizing lighting and movement of a camera through space, I created a small animation of two butterflies flying in my living room.

Unfortunately, I could not batch render an entire animation. After rendering first 50 frames, which took about 2.5 hours, I calculated that I would need 50 hours to render my 1000 frame movie. To demonstrate some of the textures, I rendered a few separate frames.

At the frame 1, we can see closely the butterfly wings and piano keys with their reflected shadows.

At the frame 322, we can see the spiral staircase materials and textures (and the realistic shadow on the wall):

At the frame 460, we can see the carpet and coffee table textures:

In order to see the carpet little better, I removed the coffee table:

At the frame 562, we can see textures of the plant (leaves, pot, crust, dirt) and the nice shadow on the wall:

 

At the frame 835, we can closely see the leather texture:

I also rendered a few other random perspective views to have a better understanding of the room layout and some other textures.

Project 2 | Elements | Tea Time

Anna ArsiriyART 314

“The teapot is a pivotal element in the history of 3D modeling”. My tea set is a typical Chinese tea service, which is dominated by the teapot, but includes a creamer, cups, plates, and a tray. My model is taken from zishateapot.org and called Chinese Dragon Kung Fu Tea Set which is made of clay (except for the tray: the tray model is taken from a different source).

 

 

 

 

All these images (as well as some of my drawings) were used as references for my models. The references for the tray are taken from target.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The material I chose for my tea set is terra cotta clay.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Maya, I created a new Mila material with the following base and flakes parameters:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think the material came out pretty realistic. For the tray, I used Mia brushed copper preset. The table top is simple Lambert.

In the master scene, I generated lights (point lights with race tray shadows) and cameras appropriate to a high-quality, professional photo-shoot. After adjusting the appropriate render settings, I rendered two pictures with my tea set still life(the end resolution is 3000 x 2000 px) using Mental Ray renderer.