Machine Project: the death of me

Leonardo da Vinci was a revolutionary for his time. A phenomenal artist, thinker and inventor, Leonardo revolutionized how we think about engineering and creating. Starting as an artist, Leonardo refused to use only his talent for art. He became entranced by the warfare that was occurring at the time and invented numerous machines that would aid in helping with war. With the invention of things such as helicopters and tanks, Leonardo did not let the bounds of the earth stop him as he created hundreds of machines. We were inspired by this creativity to create our very own drawing machine. We saw the spiral of the helicopter and immediately thought we could use gravity in our favor to send balls down its loops to help us create our drawing. This was the starting point but we went back to da Vinci's other machines to help us finalize our concept. We saw the large amount of hammers and levers, which is what we used to create the initial force that propelled the balls into motion. As they went down the spiral, we were confronted with the problem of the balls falling out of the structure we created so we had to invent a support system to ensure they stayed in. We also realized we needed infrastructure for our spiral so we found a circular box that supported it by putting pressure on it from the outside so it could keep its shape. We wanted to make sure that the painting was random and so we thought of balloons and their depreciation of pressure from them popping to release paint and have the explosion of the water in them to assist with spreading the paint. We had hoped to use water balloons but had many issues with them being too fragile yet regular balloons being too sturdy for the lightweight balls to pop. We envisioned spreading out nails on a flat surface area which would spread the pressure out ensuring that the balloons wouldn't pop right away, but hopefully pop when pressure was added by the balls. By using a colander under a funnel, we hoped that a new and original pattern would be created rather than just the plain forces of gravity making the drawing. The creative process was so difficult and I would be curious to see how da Vincis creations would have shifted had he created them in scale and tried them out. I think it's interesting to think of what might have inspired him to create these things at the time and how his vast knowledge of how things worked helped him in every aspect of his life. He studied anatomy  in depth and was one of the first to use real corpses to fully understand how the body works and begin to draw it out. The mechanics of the body might have helped him create his machines and his understanding of how it worked and its muscles may have helped him become a better artist. He not only dabbled in all things but was a revolutionary in just about everything he tried.