Hardwood Box

If you are a fan of timber craft, this is for you.

Back in my final year of high school I took small furniture construction as one of my subjects, which was awesome. This is the first assessment task that I built. It is a small timber box, which has the assassin's creed symbol stained into the lid.

The dark timber is Jarrah and the light timber is Meranti. Its held together with dovetails on the corners and has a rather large heavy lid. From memory, the lid is actually 22mm thick Meranti with the Jarrah border around it. Currently it serves as a box to hold my shot glasses and cocktail shaker.

Working with timber is such a pleasure to me and the natural grains of timber almost do the work for you as far as surface appearance goes.

I thought this would be a longer post... oh well...

This is the final project form high school!

A TIMBER SAFE! The amount of people that tell me how it is not secure because it could just be torn apart with a chainsaw is borderline annoying. This one has a She-oak door, Meranti sides, Jarrah handle, jarrah corners, Rosewood border and Rosewood edge trimming. The corner would have to be the best part, where the timber was cut and position so that all sides of the safe show only end grain. Also... there is a small piece of cypress pine inside the door where I drilled a hole for a hinge, but then found that I'd need two hinges. There was just a small piece of it laying around so we used it as a plug.

The original plan was to build the locking mechanism out of brass, but i was young a naive back then and didn’t understand the exact science behind a combination lock. Since I finished school I rebuilt the lock, using a modified door lock from a hardware store... but here’s a picture of the old combination lock face.

Makin' A Bag

Back to last semester again!

The task was to design and make a bag. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Think about how long bags have been around for and all of the different kinds of bags that already exists. There isn’t any point in just recreating your own assumptions of what makes a bag. I was told be to “be innovative!”

There was a lot of sketching ideas to get to my final concept but, to tell the truth, trying to draw fabric is not something I have a lot of success with. None are worth sharing.

Here’s what I came up with!

Right now is where I acknowledge that my concept page is a fairly rookie attempt, but just tolerate and accept that i'm not a graphic designer. Also ignore the corny name... I'm not doing marketing either.

The idea (if you can’t tell from the concept page) is that the bag is made from a number of different shaped panels that are threaded together using shoelaces. The strap is a little bit crude but after having punched nearly 200 eyelets into the fabric by hand, I’d well and truly lost interest.

The important thing to note here is that most of what I make is a first concept and more than anything it functions as proof of concept, especially at this early stage.

I hope never to use a sewing machine again.

Next time I'll share some more successful projects from the past. I'm gonna go sketch from fruit.

So Far...

This is the second semester of my first year at University and it has been quite fun. Prior to starting Uni, I worked in ICT Support which, if you have no experience in, is the most negative end of computer. Compliments and praise are rare. Enough of that... Lets go to the beginning briefley.

Sketching Sketching Sketching!!!

Lot and lots of sketching...

Mostly cubes to start with...  -__-"

The basica idea was to get a feel for perspective drawing and accuracy. There were a few different teqniques that helped, but mostly its all pretty logical... From there it was on to constructing basic geometry inside the cubes and then actually  drawing stuff that could actually be useful in the real world.

I absoluitly used an underlay for that human figure. Drawing people isnt something I'm good at.

By the end of the first semester, this was the kind of results I was getting with my sketching. There was some encouragement to try adding some shading with markers, but nothing too fancy.

All these drawings were tasks that had to be put in a folio for the end of semester...

Just for something extra, heres some music that I listen to when I'm working

https://soundcloud.com/emancipator/07-nevergreen

Thanks for reading... Slowly, I'll catch up with where I am at now. Ciao!