Brickwork in Kappa-Line Foam Board

Following on from my conversation with David Neat, I began thinking of how I could use the Kappa-Line foam board effectively in my design. When a piece of Kappa-Line is new, the board has a paper skin on each side, which makes it stiff. When one side of paper is removed, the sheet becomes bendy and movable, which is perfect for what I need it for.

While thinking of my approach to creating the brickwork across the board, I realised to make it effective, I need my pattern to be continuous, repetitive and precise. This made me think of how I could create something that would allow me to do this. Realising I needed to create a stencil to be able to create a continuous pattern, I used Illustrator to draw our my brick design. I used measurements from bricks on the exterior of the university building to be my size guide.

I took this design to the laser cutter and got it cut out on onto 4ml MDF (Top Left). I initially thought to draw around this to create my design. However, realising this would be ineffective and time consuming, I decided to try pressing the stencil onto the Kappa board with my hand, which left a faint impression. I then took it up a step and taped the board and the stencil together and used a soft rubber mallet to add the extra pressure onto the foam board- doing this on the floor (Bottom Left). (Right Image) This is how my impressions came out, which I am very happy with. The outcome from this experiment has made me very excited for the visuals of my model. I aim to refine my stencil and continue experimenting with texture and colour for my underground world.

Here is a piece of my template I created on Illustrator, which I took to be laser cut in 1:10 scale.