Koruja jalometallista

making our first cut-out design

making our first cut-out design

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This week and the next one before our autumn break our task will be creating our own cut-out design. We will be making a drawing with a theme of our choice, make sure it fits into the 50 x 50 mm. piece of silver, and then scan and retrace the drawing in Rhinoceros-program. New software to try out! I’ve been trying out Blender to create gaming characters, but I haven’t tried out anything decorative or precise yet.

Here’s a three-minute video of me creating outlines for the so-called client sketch the “traditional” way. I try to draw in a way where every stroke is the final one, no sketching around! Sorry my hand gets in the way around the middle of the video 🙂
Happy dance for new skills!
Another option I was playing with my drawing, here I drew with micron pen on top of the print-out.
This one I created outlines on top of the sketch and it’s starting to look pretty neat.

I use micron pens, as well as pencils to sketch out the design and to create the final outlines. Sometimes I sketch on top of a print-out, because I also use Procreate app on my iPad to make the initial sketch. From all the drawing apps Procreate is by far my favorite.

A little tip: silver is always better to order a bit thicker, because it can always be milled thinner. For example 1 mm is a great thickness for sheet silver as well as wire, because especially wire is something that is used in various thicknesses in different projects.

We have now trained ourselves in the process of drawing precise drawings in the Rhinoceros program. Rhino 6 to be precise, and as my fellow student pointed out, Rhino is a lot like Adobe Illustrator, except it a lot more rigid. I understand the point, but I do feel like Rhino is designed for our modeling purposes better, whether as Illustrator you’d need to be very competent in using the software before trying out to create specific designs. Rhino’s learning curve is not as steep, at least not to me.

  • Trying out different drawing tools.
  • Design task.
  • My final sketch. Don’t mind the measurement error 🙂

Next steps are:

  • printing the design
  • glueing the design onto the practice piece
  • sawing the design, checking for possible design faults. These can be;
    1. parts that are too thin once sawed so that the sawing compromises the structure,
    2. area that is pierced with a drill in order to saw is too small and the drill diameter causes too much metal to be removed.

Once these tasks are completed, the final piece will be made with silver. I purchased .925 silver(note: The numbers tell how much silver is in an alloy; most silver is produced as alloys).

As can be seen from my final Rhino drawings, the design changed a bit. after printing the design, I could see where my drawing needed improvements.

Note: Print in 1:1 scale in order to for the design to print out with the right measurements. When using Rhino, you can adjust the grid to have the major lines every 10 minor grid lines. This will help to estimate that the design is approximately right size.

In the Finnish school calendar, this is the time when the students have their autumn break. We use the term ”weeks” to measure time, so for example week 43, 19th through 25th of October, would be our vacation week. This measurement of time causes a lot of confusion because my Iphone doesn’t have that measurement in calendar settings. I myself will also be on vacation next week. Hopefully I will have some nice pictures for you to show after the vacation 🙂