My goal for this personal project was to make greater use of style and color to make an appealing product that met the Living Design's challenge stipulations of embracing biomimicry as a core design element.

After spending some time on ideation, the concept came to me while gardening to create a set of tools inspired by the very things I was tending to in my garden. To begin the project I assembled a mood board of common gardening hand tools and various fruits and vegetables.

Selecting four of the fruits on my mood board, I completed some rough sketches of 4 different tools, and shaded them using Prismacolor markers and colored pencils.

Next, the sketches were brought to life in SOLIDWORKS. For reference dimensions I traveled to several local garden supply stores and found the average lengths and widths of each tool category to inform my design.

To test the ergonomics of the tools, they were printed out on a 3D printer and assembled. I provided the model tool to several gardeners to get feedback on the shape and function, and edited my 3D models accordingly.

Finally, I rendered each of the Veggietools in Keyshot, adding textures and lighting to make the color of each tool stand out and to draw attention to the fruits and vegetables they were mimicking.