It’s been one of those days
One of those days where I’ve tried to reinvent the wheel, and wasted a lot of it. This morning I wrote Spinney Fields in brown tiles with an off white background!
During the afternoon I had to finalise a design for another mosaic client. I have to do this before I go away on my theatre outreach workshops, so it’s tight on time. This had to be a proper drawing with dimensions and scale on, as well as finalized design content as it will serve as my working drawing and needs to be agreed with architects and project managers etc. I have a sketch but that’s not what is required as foundations have to be made from this drawing, so calculating correct dimensions is critical for the building contractors and me. As I want what I make to fit what they build.
I confused myself with scales and ratios and found an online calculator where you type in your measurements for your drawing size and then type the actual real world size……. and hey presto, it calculates the scale in a millisecond……just the thing I need to progress my drawing…..eh…..but the answer I got was not even a number, it said ‘infinity’! No the question with that answer, is how long it is taking me to do this drawing!
So frustrating, as I was taking dimensions from my 1:10 scale sketch and using the formula ‘half as big again’ to all the measurements required and it generated a nice new drawing… in proportion and everything, but I did not know the scale? The computer told me this was ‘infinity’ which didn’t help. So I recalculated and had to do a whole new drawing at a scale of 1:6.
The other thing I have wrestled with today is geometry! I tried to mathematically recreate the shapes I had drawn using geometry as this would be quick and systematic…particularly useful when preparing the cartoon later. It was dawning on me that what my sketch showed looked like geometry but wasn’t really. So I went back to my original source material to see if that was generated geometrically …..The answer was, I had merged a couple of traditional carpet motifs together which were quite geometric but not exactly.
So I was never going to replicate this sketch with true geometry as it was impossible and I was going to have to make it look like geometry!
So I will create a pretend geometry, one that looks composed and balanced and mathematical but is actually just drawn close to geometry. It has taken me all day to accept that? Why………..unable to tell you……some kind not allowed to break the rules type thing has pressed on me all day …..But all of a sudden I was released from a rule that did not even need to be there.
Today I failed to re-draw a drawing I already did!
That sounds silly, but it is true. I have used a valuable day on this and you can’t afford to have off days when working in the public realm.
