chalkboard designing

Hi all, I thought I’d show some of the thought processes I go through to come up with new designs-one way anyways and probably not the most impressive way in the world but it worked for me A new design for a cart style buckle was in order so I sat down with my chalkboard and chalk while watching the Red Sox ( only drew when the other team was at bat) and worked out a scroll design to be cut from one piece of copper. Normally I draw over tracing paper but the clunky chalk works great at forcing me to only be able to draw the essential shape of my design and get the overall composition down first.

Then I scanned it into my computer and scaled it to the size of the buckle in Photoshop and traced the lines and tidied it up a bit. Now I can print it on label paper, pierce it from the copper, mount and engrave. One day from concept to completion so not too bad and a load of fun, I guess I’m multi tasking when I watch TV, I just don’t know when to stop thinking scrolls

Paul

quite frankly i think that's a very wise method of using your creative juices. quite clever. and you get to see a ballgame, totally cool. when you scan this, do the lines come out fuzzy, or fairly clean ? either way, the buckle speaks for itsself ! nice.

Paul, that is a great idea, thanks for sharing that.

monk said:

quite frankly i think that's a very wise method of using your creative juices. quite clever. and you get to see a ballgame, totally cool. when you scan this, do the lines come out fuzzy, or fairly clean ? either way, the buckle speaks for itsself ! nice.

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The lines do come out fuzzy when i scan the chalkboard Monk, but in PhotoShop I go over them better with my brush tool on a seperate layer and also make any artistic license changes along the way. You just have to be sure to scale the chalkboard scan to the same size approximately to the actual buckle size ( I overlay them in layers-actual buckle outline on top) because the line thickness will get way too thin if you need to scale it way down after you've stroked them at a much larger size.

Paul

If it can be drawn on a chalk board why can't it just be drawn directly on the buckle?..... What am I missing???

Dulltool said:

If it can be drawn on a chalk board why can't it just be drawn directly on the buckle?..... What am I missing???

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Basically I sometimes use my chalkboard to rough out ideas first so if I like one i use it as is. The design needs to be cut from metal, in my case copper and then it's soldered onto the steel buckle and engraved last-so drawing the design on the buckle wouldn't be useful to me unless I was going to engrave directly into steel in which case I would for sure. I freehand draw my designs on spurs and buckles when I engrave into the steel but for overlays like those cart bcukles the design has to be cut from sheets of metal first so a pattern is needed-especially when piercing and to keep a matching set as close to matching as possible.
Paul