Today in a moment of great energy, I proposed we take on repainting the kitchen ourselves.
So, while I was creative today, the paintbrushes and “canvas” were on a much larger scale than I’m used to…
and, as a result, the design I’m posting today is a simple technical drawing I did earlier this month:
Tomorrow I should be done with Icy Peach and will get back to my preferred watercolors and more delicate-sized paintbrushes.
See you then!
I’m computer-less for a few days as a result of some troubling computer crashes, and so am also without access to my printer/scanner. Fortunately, I remembered that I had this ring design saved in a recent email, and so am able to keep to the goal I started 200 (!) days ago of posting a design or rendering a day for a year:
In this project, I generated each of the three views (top, side and end) almost simultaneously, utilizing a series of parallel and perpendicular lines which originated from a square grid. I drew these lines on the back of the piece of vellum I was working on, then erased the lines when I finished the drawing. All of the actual rendering was done on the front of the vellum and was unaffected when I erased the guide lines. This is the “old-fashioned” way of doing a technical drawing; most jewelers today prefer to create the same concept of multiple, t0-scale views by using CAD – or computer aided design. (My CAD program, too, is inaccessible to me at this point since it is stored on my computer!)
Tomorrow, with any luck, I’ll be “back in business” with my computer and scanner and will be back to posting more colorful designs.
Until then….
While CAD is quickly making the need to do technical drawings by hand a thing of the past, knowing how to do a multiple view, to-scale technical drawing is still a very valuable skill to have. Technical drawings, whether done by hand or with CAD, are essential because they show the top, end and side views of a three-dimensional object. With hand-done technical drawings, each view is generated from a grid of lines that carry over to the next view and back.
Here is an example of a technical to-scale drawing I did for a client:
From here, I transferred the design to black Canson art paper and completed the design with watercolor and gouache. The final result:
For those of you interested in learning more about technical drawings, I highly recommend Adolfo Mattiello’s book Techniques of Jewelry Illustration and Color Rendering.
