Design

Karlspinks

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Hello all, I started engraving properly in January and I'm struggling with designs

I know this is probably a step too far but I thought I would share it none the less for critique and tips as this is the area I am struggling the most

Sorry for the bad photo, ignore the text in the corner it's not relevant. Sorry I didn't know how to crop

 
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PaulE

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cropped the photo

I cropped the photo in photoshop nd will try to upload it. First time, hope it works. The overall design is actually pleasing. The scrolls need refinement and the leaves on the outside of the larger scrolls need to be changed.
 

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monk

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i would back up a bit if it was me. practice drawing the spines. that is the basis of any decorative scrollwork you will do. if you had done much better spines in the design, the result would be much more acceptable to the eye. if you need a guide, there's perfect spine drawings in the archive. study these, and try to duplicate the smooth nature of them.
 

Karlspinks

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I have printing off every piece of drawing advice from the tips section.

Would it be acceptable to trace backbones?

Also what kind of leaves would go on the outside?

Thanks
 

Southern Custom

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You gave yourself the best critique you could get in your first post. You have shown here that with proper direction you have the ability to learn scroll design, but you are indeed moving too fast. There are too many issues with this design to offer any useful advice on the design itself. You have a classic case jumping ahead before learning the basics. The best advice I could offer would be to get Lee Griffiths, or Ron Smith's book on drawing scrollwork. From them you can learn the fundementals. Mainly how to give the scroll an origin. How to fill a space with a pleasing balanced design, how to control positive and negative space. Those are the main issues that immediately jump out when looking at your design. It's hard to learn these things from random tips on the internet.
The positive is that you obviously have the ability to absorb all these concepts. You just need some proper direction, either from books or another engraver.
Keep drawing! It's cheap and rewarding.
Layne
 

monk

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I have printing off every piece of drawing advice from the tips section.

Would it be acceptable to trace backbones?

Also what kind of leaves would go on the outside?

Thanks

perhaps to give you an idea of a very good spine. doing this, however, is avoiding the real issue of learning to draw them without a physical drawing aid. many use transfers. but there are many times when a transfer just isn't the best way to go. so learning design concepts and the ability to draw them is of paramount importance. you can get perfect spines on google images. print one 3 or 4 inches just to look at.
 

Mike_Morgan

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Be mindful of what the scroll represents... It represents organic growth. It has a beginning and an end...

There needs to be a clearly defined "Point of origin" and everything MUST flow away from that point, as it unfurls. To a novice that is not aware of the need for a point of origin, scrollwork looks like it randomly fills space, but once you become aware of the reason for having a point of origin, it starts to look far less chaotic and you can see the order in it. Designing with multiple Points of Origen CAN be done, but that creates harmoniously intertwining sets of scrolls. Start with a simple, single point until you master that.

Don't worry about leaves until you can fill a space with spines that follow a natural progression, with each scroll growing off the previous scroll in the natural and logical direction. Practice drawing nothing but the spines, and you will master the scroll layout. Once you have mastered this, then you can set your goal to understand inside leaves, and then finally, outside leaves,

It's perfectly OK to draw the scrolls rough at first, with elbows and flats... That's why the universe invented erasers! Fill the space, then go back and correct the curves until they are smooth and well-defined. There's a lot of focus here on "no flat spots" and "No elbows" when people present drawings for critique, and that's a good thing... but don't let that cripple you with fear! Draw them all janky and crooked if you want, use that to define the overall structure, then correct them!

Before you draw another line... find ten or so well designed scrolls on Google Images and STUDY THEM! Look closely, ignoring the leaves entirely... find the point of origin... follow the spine and take note of how the next scroll emanates from the previous one, and finally, how it all ends. There will likely be several end points as the design unfurls.

A writer cannot write unless he understands the language! A scroll designer needs to understand the language of scrolls... the rudiments on which its all based. The spine is the story-line... It needs to make sense. Inside and outside leaves are the adjectives and adverbs that make it all interesting.

Hopefully some of this makes sense and helps. I struggled in much the same way until the "rules" became more apparent and it suddenly "clicked". In this case, the "rules" are very freeing, because once you understand the basic concept, it becomes quite easy to execute!
 

Mike_Morgan

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To specifically critique what I see in what you've done, I took the liberty of making a couple of images that will help illustrate what's going on, at least in my mind... I removed the outside leaves for clarity, and you know they weren't working in the first place.

OK, down to brass tacks: The Scroll indicated by numbers 1&2, I'm calling the "origin Scroll" that most of this is growing from... the way you drew the leaves on the inside, defines the point of origin as being notated by the number 1 in the illustration, and it flows towards 2. This is a little awkward, because it's not "growing". The point indicated by the number 2 is smaller than number 1, but we'll go with that error for now.

You will notice that the scrolls that are indicated as number 5 (all 6 of them) are going in the opposite direction of the growth emanating from the point of origin (1), this is not good. Over on the other side, the scrolls that are indicated as number 6 (all 6 of them) are growing in the correct direction based on the flow from the point of origin.

The scroll indicated in BLUE is not harmonious with the design, even though it is correctly flowing from 3-4, small to large. There is a single sub-scroll growing from it in the correct direction, but the entire structure of this scroll is not needed, and the space would be better utilized by placing sub-scrolls off the main 1-2 scroll.

In the next illustration, I removed the leaves from the 1-2 scroll, and placed an arrow in the correct direction, based on the size of the elements. The effect of doing this makes the scrolls indicated by number 5 appear to be heading in the correct direction, This, of course, causes the srcolls indicated by number 6 to end up flowing in the wrong direction. On a side note, the scroll indicated by number 7 is heading in the correct direction as it grows from it's base scroll, but it's still wrong because it's origin scroll is wrong. The 3-4 scroll now has one section of it that is correct (the left side) but the unnecessary origin point in that scroll could be flipped over to flow off the 2 scroll.

So what you have here is a bit of a mess with Point of Origins and direction of flow... But now you know what to work on! I hope this helps.
 

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Karlspinks

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Mike thanks a lot for the time taken in your response to me.

What you have said makes a lot of sense to me but is not something I was aware off.

Organic growth is an obvious thing, but yet something I completely ignored. And point of origin was not a concept of was conscious off until this point. In many ways I'm glad I have posted something so wrong because it helps my learning.

My attention span is terrible and drawing backbones does not really appeal to me in my limited time each day practicing my hobby. I guess I will try to do it a bit more with the hope it will aid me.

Once again thanks for all the replies. I will keep you all posted with my progress.
 

Mike_Morgan

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Mike thanks a lot for the time taken in your response to me.

What you have said makes a lot of sense to me but is not something I was aware off.

Organic growth is an obvious thing, but yet something I completely ignored. And point of origin was not a concept of was conscious off until this point. In many ways I'm glad I have posted something so wrong because it helps my learning.

My attention span is terrible and drawing backbones does not really appeal to me in my limited time each day practicing my hobby. I guess I will try to do it a bit more with the hope it will aid me.

The hardest thing in the learning process is putting your work out there for others to tear apart! But it's also the best thing you can do.

Drawing backbones isn't much fun, at first, and many people, myself included, tried to find ways around it. There is absolutely no substitute for spending time with a pencil, paper and eraser if you want to take this seriously! Personally, I hated drawing scroll spines because I was not very good at it! I still get a relatively minor flat spot on a drawing occasionally, but I correct it on the work piece when I notice it's there. I can tell you this with complete confidence, whenever you're bad at something the human tendency is to avoid it, and you should do the exact opposite. Go ahead and do it badly! Do it again and again, be just TERRIBLE at it. But be AWARE that you're doing it badly. Jump in with both feet, and do your best... then make corrections... be honest with yourself about what you see. Smooth it out, there's no time limit for a drawing... finesse it into shape. You'll start to enjoy it as you become more proficient at it. I promise.

Walk before you run! Think of the backbone as a foundation. A solid foundation leads to a better structure above! Don't worry about leaves yet, you'll be building a house on a weak foundation and it will never be right, or even correctable! Think of it like this... If you have a poor backbone, then the leaves will suffer. If you draw leaves on a weak backbone, and you see the scroll is off kilter a bit, then you have to erase the leaves, fix the spine, then draw the leaves again, because fixing the spine will change the structure of the leaf! If you have a bad spine, then poor leaves, and you SHADE it... it's even more difficult to correct it. Dig deep and you will soon discover that once you can adequately draw the backbones, then leaves become pretty darned easy... both inside and outside. And once you have all that sorted, then shading is the next step, and the better your backbone and leaves are, the easier it is to shade it all out.

Learn how to enjoy doing it, even if you're bad at it. The joy comes from making progress and showing even slight improvement with each sketch. Get a sketchbook, and FILL it with backbones, Draw border shapes like squares or ovals, and fill those shapes with scrolls, and make every scroll grow off the main scroll, filling the shape. The better you can do this task, the easier it is to create a leaf structure that actually makes sense.

Just have fun with it!
 

Crossbolt

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As a beginner I won't comment on scroll details. I'll add one "big picture" - forest insteady of leaves (or scrolls) comment that struck me first off that I don't see mentioned.
To me the design appears bottom heavy, meaning the larger scrolls occur in the center and lower portions of the image. The upper half is occupied by smaller scrolls.
Maybe that would work in the context of the piece but I'd suggest it's something to look at if you haven't already consciously decided that's the way you want to go.
Just an impression I thought I'd try to help out with.
Thanks for posting it.
Jeremy
 

Grayson

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Mike,
Wow! That helped me a lot. I've been cutting practice patterns since attending the Cover school of engraving in June, and I've begun to feel good about my cuts. Drawing, however has been pathetic. I've already heard and read and seen what you've said, but it didn't sink in. I've been stuck on page 25 of Ron Smith's book forever. I would have done anything to learn to draw scrolls, except practice.
So: I. Don't sweat the elbows, for now. II. One point of origin and unidirectional growth. III. Draw more.

Thank you, Mike and Karlspinks!
 

Karlspinks

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So this is the same area as my initial drawing with a simpler design
Just spend a few hours doing backbones.

The point of origin would be bottom left and all the leaves would flow from that direction up to the top left.


How are my backbones??
 

Mike_Morgan

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You can have the scroll emerge from the corner like that, or you can flip that first small scroll and use it as an origin scroll as your point of origin, as illustrated below... I flipped and traced the actual scroll you drew, and adjusted the first subscroll to flow more naturally from the origin scroll. As far as your backbones... everything is heading in the right direction, and the more you practice, the smoother they will become.
 

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Mike_Morgan

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Thanks Mike. Your a legend. I will keep at it and post some more

LOL... I'm not a legend, even in my own mind... but I do enjoy helping if I can... It was just a year ago that the great folks on this forum stepped up to the plate and helped me through the same things!
 

Karlspinks

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Hopefully in some years when I look back and see how (with luck and effort) I have improved, I will remember your help, and for that reason to me your a ledge! No getting away from it I am afraid.
 

dave gibson

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Wow, some great information explained in a way that can be understood,,, after I read it a few more times. Karlspinks, you got a great lesson here and Mike-Morgan spelled it out great. I'll recommend the obvious, books, 2 by Ron Smith and 1 booklet/ DVD pkg. by Ken Griffiths. If you cant get the books for a while, trace. Tracing will explain a lot of what's been discussed here already but tracing scroll patterns that you already know are correct , you'll see it as it happens before your eyes. Also tracing builds muscle memory, an absolutely necessary skill in engraving. Trace for a while then when you understand how a scroll is built you'll be a lot more comfortable drawing your own.
 

looneyg

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I haven't posted here before, and am just beginning. Have started to draw some scrolls and knew they were off but didn't know how or why they were off. After reading Mike_Morgans explanation I understand much better. I will be putting some of mine up soon and hope that my problems with scrolls will be explained as wonderfully. Truly a great help to beginners.
 

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