When thinking about my chess set I wanted to utilize a couple of things, moving parts and added materials. I'm feeling pretty excited about what I was able to put together with these constrictions!
When I was thinking about materials I thought it might be fun to bring fibre into the mix as it's been a pretty important part of my art practice for a while. When thinking how I could use it I thought about how cute it would be to have little sweaters for a chess set. Then came the issue of arms, I didn't want the sweaters to feel unnecessary to the design so arms needed to be made but I didn't like the idea of having to rely that much on support materials as some of the pieces might be quite tall.
So, after watching a video about connecting mechanisms in 3D printing I came across the idea of "nub" connectors which can be seen in my designs below. Because the pieces are printed separately and snapped together they don't need to be quite as precise as a pin joint and can be easily replaced if damaged.
I then took it a step further, I really love the idea of chains that sit differently at different angles. For this reason I added a rounded part to the bottom of each section. This way when the arm sits at the sides of the pieces it will have a bit of shape to it but when the arms are flexed inwards they will flop down. I thought it would be a fun way of bringing engineering into the designs and also give the arms more structure.
As for the design of the actual pieces I wanted to keep it a bit more simple. I decided to give a subtle shift to the curves of the pieces both for aesthetic reasons and to make the printing job easier and prevent the use of support structures. My reason for not changing the bodies of the pieces is so that they are still easily identifiable as chess pieces, I've loved playing chess since I was young and I like the idea of enhancing the pieces rather then completely starting from scratch, I want it to feel like a playful take on a serious game and for the subversion to come from additions to the original pieces.
Finally, we come to my final concepts. I ended up straying away from the sweater theme and decided to focus on outerwear as a whole. I did this so that I could give each piece a distinct personality and really have space to play with the details in the outfits. Each of the outfits will be stitched directly onto the pieces to prevent having to worry about closures and things like that that don't tend to scale down very well. I did decide to keep the pons simple because I could see myself printing and constructing a full chess set from this design and I wanted their outfits to be easy to cut out and sew together in large quantities. I also designed holes in the hands but now looking back at how they'd have to be printed I'm not sure that's as feasible as I had hoped so I'll decide later whether I want to revisit that idea with the printing process in mind or not.
Overall, I'm really excited to get started on this project and proud of the concepts I've come up with!
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