The Zenith project is the final Senior project here at Freestyle that is the culmination of all the things that we have learned at Freestyle over Junior and Senior year. It gives us the freedom to choose a project that we are interested in, provided that it applies to our elective. Over the course of two months, we are to draft, plan, and create our project from scratch before creating a final presentation that is shown to all of Freestyle.
For my Zenith project I wanted to choose something that seemed interesting to me and also pushed me to try skills that I wasn’t familiar with. That ended up leading me to choose to make blind boxes. The reason why I chose it was because I have wanted to create figures out of polymer clay but wasn’t familiar with the process as well as learning how to make boxes and branding. Overall, it took the things that I had become comfortable with doing over the past year and amplified them enough to where I had to push myself in the process.
Drafting
The first thing that I did was decide on what I wanted my subject to be for the blind boxes. That led me to creating cats in different professions. I created six cats that I wanted to be the “regular” rarity figures and then one cat that was going to be the special rarity figure. After designing the cats, I made id cards for each of them to match the theming of cats at work. The final thing that I made a draft of was the design for the box.
Process: Figures
I created a prototype for the cats to figure out what shape I wanted the cat to have. After making the practice one I made notes on things that I would need to change when creating the final cats. Then came creating each of the individual cats. The part I struggled with the most was creating clothes and keeping the cats a consistent size. The first cats that I made took me around 3 hours each but as I got better at the process it started taking me around an hour to make each.
After creating the cats and baking them, I then coated them in uv resin to create a more polished and professional look.
Process: Cards and Boxes
To create the cards and boxes I first had to create final mockups in Adobe Illustrator. I used a box template from the internet and printed it out to ensure that the figures would fit inside before creating the final design. The final design ended up being slightly different than the original sketch I had because my vision for it had slightly changed.
The hardest part in maxing the box specifically was that a key part of blind boxes is the pull tab that they have; a special way of opening them that makes it different than opening a regular box. After looking at various blind boxes I came to a conclusion on how to create a pull tab, however after I printed and tested it it tended to rip before finishing opening. Athena came to the solution of adding an extra piece of paper beneath to keep the structure and this helped create the final version of the pull tab.
Final Product
The final product is honestly quite boring to look at because all of the cats are tucked inside the boxes to be randomized and opened at the Zenith presentation, but this project ended up so good and I was extremely satisfied with the final product.
