d’Arte Board

Last week I was having energy and anxiety issue. Finally, one day at work, I forced myself to draw this:

As I said then on tumblr, “When the world seems particularly stupid I get an obsessive urge to make perspective drawings to assure myself order still exists, even if it’s just the illusion of such.”

Since then, my computer has refused to acknowledge my printer/scanner combo, my cable television cut out and as of this morning, my building’s water didn’t work. Possibly due to a crackhead stealing it’s pipes. Clearly, a fancy cube wasn’t going to cut it. Thus I present you, the “rhombicuboctahedron,” a term I had to look up on google this morning. I had been calling it a 3D octagon, but will now pretend I knew it’s real name all along.

(I apologize for the appearance of these photos. Due to my scanner being out I used my camera and apparently messed up the entire enterprise.) This version was inked with drafting pen on vellum (the vellum I’m using is basically high quality tracing paper). This allows me to preserve states of the original so I can go different directions later if I choose.

This is an earlier state of the same drawing showing the completely transparent rhombicuboctahedron. It may take a while to understand it as such, but I assure you it’s true.

The next 2 drawings are blurry. I apologize, but they help give context to the above 2 drawings.

This is the original pencil drawing. It’s actually nearing the point where I can’t force more marks into it. That’s why I have the vellum versions. I can continue to tweak this whether or not this drawing itself is still usable.

This is a shot of a vellum drawing of the grid I used to map out the squiggly lines (the squiggles you see in this are the above pencil drawing seenn through the vellum, imperfectly aligned). With this same grid I can theoretically plot any design onto the form.

Finally, a shot of my workspace. The octagon above the drawing was used as the plan for the final drawing. Using such a plan allows you to accurately plot the depth dimension of the perspective drawing. Here’s a tutorial, if you’re interested.

This entry was posted on September 20, 2011 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Art, Drawing, J. D. Hastings with tags Art, Drawing, geometry, J. D. Hastings, mental health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.