For my midterm I was really focused on incorporating nature into my lamp.  I like the idea that even when the lamp is not on, it still serves a purpose and when combined together correctly, can even be greater than the sum of its parts.  I have been thinking a lot about vases lately and so it seemed a natural evolution to add this vase element into my lamp.  The first difficulty when concepting the lamp was finding the right balance between the two forms – how much lamp do I want and how much vase do I want?  In the end, I thought it would be best to have the lamp be served by the flowers and not the other way around.  Although, this resolution does add a few bumps in the road, namely not being able to provide water to the plants, so I haven’t quite settled on this yet.  For my preliminary test, I just wanted to see how the flowers would look when I tried to apply a basic geometric form to them.  Flowers, and vases for that matter, tend to allow for natural and biological forms, whereas for my lamp I wanted to change that up just a bit.

The flowers seemed to take well to that shape, so I decided to go ahead with that as the basic form.  For the test, I used clear plexiglass for economical purposes, but for the final version I wanted to use an opaque white which would allow for the light to diffuse in a nice way.

Another concern was the orientation of the lamp.  Do the flowers go on top or on bottom half?  Having the flowers on the bottom allows for a way to keep the plants in water but doesn’t allow for the flowers to have any light flowing through them.  Having the flowers on the top lets tons of light into the flowers and creates the effect I am going for but makes it harder to incorporate a way to keep the plants alive. (Also a slight possibility of a fire hazard – not good.)

I will follow up with my final along with any iterations.

Here she is with moving stars. In order to make the stars move I had to keep part of the stars coding out of the drawStars function and keep them as universal “int”s. I tried to figure out why, but am still not sure. The stars also seem to go much faster on the posted version versus my real version – again, not sure why.

Here is my first attempt to organize my code using functions. I haven’t bothered with adding the moving stars or lazers in just yet, but will do so soon.