For the headstock design, I went through the tutorial designing several iterations using Adobe Illustrator instead of drawing on paper (which can be seen on my videos page). However, I don’t have an active printer at home, so I decided to draw on the headstock sticking to a simplistic design, I did clamp down the piece once my partner, Taylor, and I located a c-clamp. I didn’t have a good work surface for this, so as you can see I made a vintage metal chair work for me. Partway through I managed to break the blade as well, so I ended up purchasing additional blades for the coping saw which I borrowed. I did cuts in as you can see, so as to ease up on the release of the extra wood.

I spent much, much time sanding once the piece was cut out to make sure it looked as good as possible, which took a few hours because there were cuts into the wood from the blade of the saw, and I wanted this to look as even as possible.

Skills Required: Patience, a Steady Hand, Creativity, Design Translation, Iterative Design

If I had done this differently, I would have loved to have access to machinery to make a unique design, but for being hand done, I did find my design to come out quite nicely! A printer that works and is easy to access would have helped as well to allow for experimentation. I did find my digital route to work for my purposes though and that gave me a good foundation on how to proceed.

The first image is my simplistic Adobe Illustrator design, which looks quite similar to my actual body sketch!