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Old 03-24-2008, 08:59 AM
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pilkguns pilkguns is offline
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Default Re: Scrollwork design and analysis, step by step tutorial

Yes, the large center leaf. I would say the most noticeable design feature of this gun is the 3 large leaves that take up the central portion of each panel. In the panel we are looking at first, you can see that the leaf is centered in the space dictated by the panel’s edges. If you erased everything but the leaf, you would see that it is sitting in the middle of the panel, balanced as it were, with an roughly equal space out to the north south east and west edges.

It is somewhat abnormal in scrollwork to have a leaf itself this big in the overall pattern, so lets look at another aspect of the design, the main scroll in this panel, which as you can see fills the panel in a equal balanced manner. This is your main scroll, akin to the trunk of tree. When laying out a design, you want to draw your main scrolls so that they fill out the area in equal proportions, meaning that the scrolls should be roughly the same size. In this panel, there is only one main scroll, so notice that it fills the whole panel in an equal manner.


Excuse my messy photoshop erasing, but can you see that each of the four quadrant sections created by this scroll spine are roughly equal in size to each other, Even #4 which is an odd shape because of the shape of the outline of the 1873. This again is principle we want to enforce, creating areas of roughly equal size as we ad details into the picture. Not only are the roughly equal in size, they are balanced in their placement, with each of the four smaller areas around the one big scroll equidistant from each other. In this case, you have created a square with each of the smaller areas (1-4) being a corner of the square.

Ok, going back to the overall picture, what is the next level of design elements that jump out at you?
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