I’m supposed to be studying for a violin construction quiz. Thought I’d cheat on my blog here and just post some of my notes. As you will see, they can be a little, um, excessive at times.
I definitely drew that around Thanksgiving.
Some assembly required….
The final chart is gonna look craaaaaaaazyyyy. When I finish the other parts, maybe I’ll have to combine it all, dress it up all pretty with color, and make prints of it.
Huh, so a “high B” is closer to a C in music, but closer to an A in grades.
And now for a timed selfie with nearly complete violin body. My baaaby! ❤
Cleaning up my edges!
Back to school! Thankfully, I found my bass bar more or less the way I left it nearly a month ago. It’s all done and glued in now. Definitely not perfect, but a decent first attempt, I think.
This little animation explains the ridiculous challenge of the bass bar. You aren’t fitting it to just plop down and sit perfectly (though some people do?), you have to put it under a little tension. This means gradually over-cutting or lifting the ends of the bass bar, but still making sure the entire bar will make contact if you are pressing it into the plate. But you have to make sure that the way the bar contacts doesn’t twist your plate either! Just a few things to worry about. There’s probably only like a million other things too.
I glued up the bar yesterday and snapped some photos.
Those clamps. That bar. Those little cleats. The straight grain accentuating the topography of the spruce. All this inevitably leads me into….
Did you know that I was once a great master of Photoshopping horribly underdeveloped models into magical architectural wonderlands? I exaggerate only as much as an architectural rendering does. People ask me how I do it. The methodology is very very simple, but making a good rendering requires some pretty well-developed eye judgment. Kind of like violins… That said, let’s take the above photo and make a rather ridiculous rendering lacking in good judgment.
Other notes: I am a heavy user of Multiply, masks, brush and pattern presets, and Flickr. I am a very light user of layers. Keep that file light.
And remember, if anything’s looking off or ugly, or if something’s underdeveloped, or if you’re too lazy to solve some particular detail, you can always just FIX IT WITH SHADING!
My 2nd trimester at CSVM has ended and I’m on break. Last thing I did was try to finish my bass bar in a huge panic, and well… let’s just say adrenaline is unhelpful for very fine knife work.
Several upperclassmen recounted horror stories of unfinished bass bars warping and twisting over breaks. This happens to be the LONGEST break we get – 3.5 weeks – and it’s spring, so I know Chicago will go from frozen to warm to thunderstorm to sun several times. Everyone has told me I can’t expect to pick up where I left off before break… and maybe I will have to restart completely!
In fact, with all the stories people love to tell, I think now I might be disappointed if I am greeted by anything short of this:
fix it with shading 