For Claire here are a couple of snaps of the machine that produced the drawings in the entry below. I've since dismantled it and will probably make another at Christmas time.
In the meantime I've finished my M1 module.
These are designs from a Meccanograph I completed recently based on a design by the Nightingale family. This is my first motorised effort so the quality of the designs is better although rather noisy and in some cases can take up to 30 minutes to complete the drawing. They're all drawn with cheap biros (62p for 20 biros is pretty cheap) yet they produce fine results due to the gearing down of the machine.
which has more of a shell-like appearance than the completed pink one which looks more two-dimensional.
Lacy effect shown in the blue pattern
The feather-edge on the mauve design is produced by using cams to push the drawing pen away and it returns because the pen holder is attached to rubber bands. Cunning eh?
These designs suggest birds in flight to me
The pink design may remind you of a Slinky Spring.
This is drawn with a black Bic biro and reminds me of
marquetry inlay where they try and emulate a 3d effect.
Eat you heart out Kandinsky, this design is produced by switching the machine off and manually moving the drawing pen and then setting a different gear ratio.
On Wednesday I saw the Cloth and Culture Now exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts on the University of East Anglia campus at Norwich. As my wife used to teach Creative and Critical Writing there the campus was familiar but I'd never actually been to the Sainsbury Centre.
The admission is £2 and the exhibition was staged over three areas - a large space on the ground floor, a couple of items in a long subterranean link corridor and another room at the end of that which I found an odd layout. There were works from various international artists particularly the Baltic States. There was very little knitting but many different types of craft on show. Photography is not allowed and neither can you touch the exhibits which was a bit frustrating as many exhibits were formed on the basis of the texture. There were one or two installation type pieces and some using video but mostly static works. This was not an exhibition of artists key works (none of the works on the website landing page are on display) and it did feel a little 'B' movie here and there. However it was engaging and intersting to see how the artist had translated ideas into art using differnet materials and techniques. The shop offered the book to go along with it for £25 but it's student textbook rather than coffee-table reading.
The exhibition will tour later in the year and my recommendation would be if you're in the vicinity go along. Of course there are also permanent collections based in the Sainsbury Centre but as it was my birthday we headed off for some more treats in Norwich in particular to find the Gurney Clock which I'd been trying to track down for years. I'll pop some pictures of it in my next post.
I thoroughly enjoyed Wednesday's meet at the V&A and it was a pleasure to meet all of you.
Here's a little about Meccanographs then by way of an explanation.
Denys Fisher produced his Spirograph toy in the mid-Sixties although curve-stitching for mathematics students had been around a long while before that. String-art also came to the fore soon after.
Frank Hornby produced his wonderful construction system Meccano around 1900 and by combining these two elements of Meccano and Harmonographs (the much older 3D version of Spirograph) the Meccanograph was born! There have been published designs for these since the 1920's. Since then Modern Meccanomen (including women) have designed new Meccanographs which produce amazing designs.
Essentially they consist of a paper pad mounted on a drawing table which is itself mounted on a system of gears and rods which can both rotate the table and move it back&forth simultaneously. The pen is mounted at one end of a set of arms which is usually some sort of parallelogram and then one or more gear boxes connects this to either a crank or a shaft which can then be driven by a motor. All you have to do to produce a drawing is choose your colour pen and select which gears to use and then you just turn the handle....and turn...and turn... etc.
The handcrank is the yellow wheel on the left and the biro is at the top-right with the red parts on the sides of the parallelogram mechanism.
It uses a clever mechanism called a Schmidt coupling to transmit rotary motion to the table even while the table is moving left or right. Try moving a radio dial while somebody's carrying the radio away from you!!
..and below are a couple of examples of the output from this machine.
Here's an example:
<=This is a rubbing from one of the Victorian pillars at my local railway station. Unfortunately with the train companies changing around and brand image changes they just paint over them thereby losing the detail. After I've taken my rubbing I scan it into the computer. In this case it's a symmetric pattern so I just choose the best bits and clone them to make a decent image to work from.
Essentially Bump Mapping translates dark areas to flat areas and light areas to lofted areas. So I clean up the image and then increase the contrast to make better defined edges or I can blur areas to make sloping edges. Here's the bump map (as my image is now called) made from the image above.
In fact any tools can be used on the image and of course you can use any image to do this - it doesn't need to be in colour in fact bump maps are always monochrome to keep the filesize down.
The object representing the pillar in the computer is a simple flat-surfaced cylinder.
When the program renders the image and applies the bump map to the surface the result is the 3D texture of the pillar without having to spend hours modelling every single facet.
The image below shows a quick test render of the pillar.
Happy New Year!
Although I've not progressed with actual work on the course I have made a concerted effort to organise myself and so Ravelry and Vox are now linked up with Flickr and I closed my Photobucket account.
Just to prove that I have produced the knit items here are some of them at the blocking stage:
I finished the angel this evening. A demanding project and in the end I used Spray Starch and ironing to stiffen the lace but delighted to finish it on this night.
Hi!
Recent Comments
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rosh said:
Wow - you've reminded me of Cundy and Rollet. read more
on The machine that drew the patterns in the April entry -
Clive said:
yes they're quite temperamental but a good crowd-puller !I haven't seen Lockwood's book - but have referenced others like Cundy... read more
on The machine that drew the patterns in the April entry -
rosh said:
Hello Clive Your meccanograph really rolled back the years for me. Dad made one for me several times in the... read more
on The machine that drew the patterns in the April entry -
Claire said:
These are incredible. Have you got a picture of the gizmo itself? I'm immensely impressed. read more
on A new ,even sexier, Meccanospirograph!
Hi Clive. I've found my Cundy & Rollet - reminds me that when I was in the 6th form I... read more
on The machine that drew the patterns in the April entry