Starting to THINK about a final piece..

After A LOT of thinking.. I have finally come up with an idea!

I want to some how make a sphere, representing the WORLD! I am then going to make some trees, and have them sticking out of the 'globe'. My initial idea is that I am going to find out what percentage of the earth is covered by forest, and represent that with the trees sprouting from my world. I am going to try and show this by only covering that percentage of the world with the trees.

 So.. I need to find the best way to make a 'ball' using paper, without paper mache-ing a balloon! My first thought is making it up out of pentagons and hexagons, like a football :

With this idea in mind, I went to a sports shop to have a look at a football, and take at least one photo to refer to.. as I currently do not own my own football already! 

Here is my first attempt! I drew the shapes out firstly, and then used the method Richard Sweeney showed us last session, about folding the paper to create more symmetrical shapes, so when I cut out I was cutting more than one piece at a time. In total I worked out that I would need 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.

 When I first started putting the shapes together I thought it was going quite well and work just fine..

But as I got further along with it, I started to think that all the edges where they link are a bit too sharp, as in not smooth and round enough. The pattern that started to emerge was reminding me of honey comb, which of course was sort of expected from the shapes being used. 

However it was creating a spherical shape... UNTIL ..

 Somewhere I went wrong! And it stopped going round and started coming out! OOPS! I think I just made a mistake in the combination order of the pent and hexagons, as I had also started running out of the shapes!
Instead of just trying again straight away, I decided to try and search for better images to refer to, as the photo I was using didn't even show the hole football, which I think is partly why I went wrong! That and a decrease in concentration!

After a while searching on google and a couple of other sites.. I finally found this net! ^ which I printed off and   assembled, to see how well it worked and how it went together.

 I was very pleased with how this worked! As it had no tabs when I stuck it together in various bits, it came together a lot rounder than my attempt with the separate shapes. So if I was to use this method, I would draw out the net on a much larger scale on white paper, as one big shape. I really think this would work well.

This was another idea that I had discussed with a friend. The idea was that I made a cube out of paper to go in the middle, and then wrapped the paper strips around it to make the sphere.. but as you can see it didn't work that well at all! Never mind..  the only way of finding out is trying it out!

THEN I found this! I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before! Therefore I am now going to try this out, by cutting out those leaf type shapes and seeing how easy it is! WATCH THIS SPACE!