10 October 2009

Picasso it ain't...












Having mailed the latest drawings off to Furniture & Cabinetmaking this morning, I took a shot of the current one before I went down to the Post Office on the 'Blokebike'. This one shows a splined mitre as found in a picture or mirror frame. I used to do this sort of stuff a lot at university for all my design projects and though I'm a bit rusty at doing this type of thing (as it was over thirty years ago) it didn't take to long to get back into the swing of it.
In conversation with Michael Huntley some time ago, I suggested that a few hand tinted sketches might be good to accompany his series 'Tight Joints' in the mag. What prompted it was we were both poring through an issue of FWW trying to decide what, if anything, we liked and what made it better than F&C. There were many areas that we thought were excellent but one of the things that was very obvious to me was the quantity of really good hand drawn and tinted sketches, so one thing led to another...
I use a drawing board, 'T' square and 4H pencil to very lightly draw them in isometric projection, after which I ink in the outlines freehand using the 'thick and thin' rule. The ink is left to dry overnight after which the pencil lines are erased and the colour washes applied. It's then left again to dry overnight and the woody textural rendering is done with ordinary colouring crayons that were loaned to me by Megs.
By the merest fluke, the current small job is a set of three picture frames, constructed using splined mitres...

2 comments:

Mitchell said...

Very well done, mate. Very well done.

And you are right, hand drawings beat out computer renderings every time as a machine cannot duplicate the feelings of the human hand.

Thanks,

Peace

Kari Hultman said...

I'm with you, Rob. Hand sketched is so much better than computer. I just cannot bring myself to learn sketchup. Too cold.