Monday, March 7, 2016

Starting from scratch / Why artists can have strong feeling about Intellectual Property.

Starting at the beginning, one does not realize how much work there is in designing ornaments with little previous information.  There are many who cry about "Intellectual Property", copyright and patent infringement and others who decry that once it is in the public, it is 'fair-game'.

Having seen only a few three-dimensional globe type ornaments in plastic canvas, I had little to start basing ornament construction on.  Many times I can modify a technique I already have mastered and just transpose onto another medium.  With Plastic Canvas I really had to start almost at the beginning.  I had found a few patterns for globes on Pinterest but really didn’t like the way the ornaments were constructed nor finished.  The design of the ornaments did not excite my aesthetic sensibilities.  Making variations to existing designs is relatively easy, building it from the ‘ground up’ takes some time.

Over the weekend I started taking my designs for the plastic canvas ornaments from concept to layout.  Using Adobe Illustrator CS4 I made a grid for the 7 Mesh plastic canvas sheets I will use for most of the ornaments.  My first attempt was slightly off, when I laid a piece of plastic canvas on top of the printed sheet, I noticed the graphic was slightly smaller producing a moire pattern.  I adjusted the scale of the pattern by increasing the entire graphic 1% until no moire pattern was visible. 

Once the graph was the properly scaled, I was able to start transposing my design from rough sketches to the graph for both pattern and cutting.  I transposed several concepts for the chandelier along with the concepts for what I have been calling “the globes”.  “The globes” are four (4) designs for three-dimensional ornaments most commonly found on Christmas trees: a sphere, an ovoid or squash which is wider than it is tall, another ovoid which is taller than it is wide, and a navette, similar to an oval but with pointed ends instead of rounded.  I am thinking about making another variation and mixing the point from the bottom of the navette and the rounded top of the sphere to create a teardrop or onion dome, depending on the orientation of the ornament.  Variations are easier once the basic framework is set.

Using rectangles I filled in the graph to represent the stitched portions of the plastic canvas which would be needed to make the ornaments.  Since I am wanting the globes to all be similar in construction, I used the same basic layout, the same circumference, or “Equator” of 72 holes and a 5 hole over lap for joining the ends together.  Since I did not know if I wanted 4 or 6 supported arms I knew I needed a number of hole easily divisible by both 4 and 6.  Once I re-designed with 5 and 6 support arms, the connection areas would be problematic due to the available designs of plastic canvas, so back to the original 4 arm design.    By making changes in the length of the support arms I was able to create all four shapes I wanted.  I then used the same design for connecting the support arms for three of the four designs.  The ends of the support arms for the Navette would need to be adapted to create points at the top and bottom, or “Poles” instead of the rounded ends needed for the other three.

Once done, I printed out the page with all four (4) ornaments layered so that I could construct a paper version of the ornament before cutting the plastic canvas.  Using 72 holes for the ornament would make the diameter to be 3.25 inches, a little larger than the common sized ornaments, If I used 60 holes, it would produce an ornament roughly 2.75" in diameter.  I will make an ornament in each size to see which I prefer.


Having printed out the graph and taped the paper ornament together, now I am ready to actually cut the pattern out and stitch each of the ornaments.   After looking at them I may decide to scrap this entire project but my brain may not let me.


Photos to follow.

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