Yep, I've started another one. A young friend is getting married in June and I decided to do an illusion piece for them. This is actually a practice piece so I can work out a couple design elements. After looking at what I've done already on this piece I have two design changes I'm going to make on their basket which will be maple. This one is black locust.
I plan to eventually finish this one, but for now I'm just doing enough to see how the design works.
This basket is the inspiration for my design. A majority of the baskets I've seen have only one red band, which typically represents major life changes, i.e. a wedding, or the birth of a child. Since my friend and his fiance had their first baby a couple months ago, I decided to do two red bands, one for the wedding and one for the baby.
I'll give an explanation of the elements and their meaning in a later post.
One change I've made is how I lay out the design. I don't use an index wheel, or anything else on the lathe, I've typically used a ruler and polar graph paper. That really doesn't work well on this design because of the white "open wedge" from the center to the rim. On this one I'm using a divider and pencil. The result is a much "tighter" design.
Here are a series of pictures showing my results so far. And for those who always wonder how much time it takes to make one of these, each successive picture represents an hour to hour and a half of time.
Initial layout starting with the "wedge" and coloring a few spaces red to give me a visual reference when laying out the triangles.
Finished the center elements and moving out to the middle. Although there are always exceptions to the rule, typically, repeating elements appear in odd numbers. Hence, the nine "triangles".
This shows one thing I'm going to change on the maple basket. The middle looks too much like a star, which is not the intention. I'll reduce the number of items in the middle to add more white space.
Moving to the middle, I started laying out and coloring the touching triangles. This shows another change I'll make. I think the design, and the symbolism would benefit by having a row of white separating the triangles.
Finished laying out the outer row and colored some elements.
I plan to eventually finish this one, but for now I'm just doing enough to see how the design works.
This basket is the inspiration for my design. A majority of the baskets I've seen have only one red band, which typically represents major life changes, i.e. a wedding, or the birth of a child. Since my friend and his fiance had their first baby a couple months ago, I decided to do two red bands, one for the wedding and one for the baby.
I'll give an explanation of the elements and their meaning in a later post.
One change I've made is how I lay out the design. I don't use an index wheel, or anything else on the lathe, I've typically used a ruler and polar graph paper. That really doesn't work well on this design because of the white "open wedge" from the center to the rim. On this one I'm using a divider and pencil. The result is a much "tighter" design.
Here are a series of pictures showing my results so far. And for those who always wonder how much time it takes to make one of these, each successive picture represents an hour to hour and a half of time.
Initial layout starting with the "wedge" and coloring a few spaces red to give me a visual reference when laying out the triangles.
Finished the center elements and moving out to the middle. Although there are always exceptions to the rule, typically, repeating elements appear in odd numbers. Hence, the nine "triangles".
This shows one thing I'm going to change on the maple basket. The middle looks too much like a star, which is not the intention. I'll reduce the number of items in the middle to add more white space.
Moving to the middle, I started laying out and coloring the touching triangles. This shows another change I'll make. I think the design, and the symbolism would benefit by having a row of white separating the triangles.
Finished laying out the outer row and colored some elements.
