Greenville Poinsettia Christmas Parade 2010

Our completed float was debuted on Main Street downtown Greenville, SC at the Greenville Poinsettia Christmas Parade. The parade officials awarded us the Joel Poinsett Best Overall award!

Thanks to my adorable friends for riding along on the float with me. (It was freezing!) Love you guys :)

photo credits :: photo 2 - this flicker stream :: photo 3 and 4 - The Collegian

The Making Of (continued)

A lot of the work on our float was assembled at our office, but in order to start building the final version we trucked everything to a weld shop/warehouse off campus. At this location we attached all the elements to our float bed.

Our float is a trailer with a wooden stage built on top. The pear tree, swans, drum, geese and golden rings were attached to this base using screws, foam sealant and wire. Every empty crack was desperately packed to the brim with hot glue.

 
photo credit :: photo 3 - Philip Eoute

The Making Of

Happy New Year! It has been a while since I've written. There certainly is a lot to recap. This past year (2010) I was able to play a big part in the designing of a float for the Greenville Poinsettia Christmas Parade. The university I work for enters a float in this parade every year, and this year I was able to be a part of the team. The theme of the 2010 Poinsettia parade was The Twelve Days of Christmas.

I drew inspiration from the Scandinavian style of artists such as Sanna Annukka as well as a visit to Disney's It's A Small World in May 2010. I tried to incorporate the graphic simplicity of this geometrical style. The first step was to sketch and vectorize each character/element of the float. (Check out my earlier post for a peak at what these creatures looked like in the early stages.) The vector design was used by my fabulously skillful boss to create a 3-D version in Google Sketch-Up.
Our float mocked up in Google Sketch-Up

The shapes were cut from 4-inch Styrofoam. These pieces were covered with petal paper. We used more hot glue sticks than I want to remember, and everyone involved burned themselves enough to last us til next year. (Wanna see my scars?)
French Hen cut from 4-inch Styrofoam

Swan-a-swimming decked in petal paper. Iridescent and black