I have recently been sorting through our digital collection of Martin Pierce’s drawings and wanted to share these with our blog followers. As a door hardware designer, our clients who are themselves designers frequently ask us to create unusual cabinet knobs as statement pieces for residential projects and also for public spaces in commercial settings. If we are to be awarded the commission, then the first task is to come up with a beautiful drawing that will capture the interest of the designer. Some designers will have already sketched out their own ideas but for the majority of commissions we are given little to go by, which we like, as this gives Martin a broad creative license. We have shared with you how our Hawaiian door pulls began with a commission by designer Debbie Zylstra who was in search of cabinet knobs for an entertainment center and how the designs we created needed to incorporate local floral and bird life.
The drawings above were the basis of the Hawaiian bird pulls and were approved as drawn. The drawings were done by hand old school fashion on a drawing board and then colored using a variety of colored pencils of the type available at any art supply store. While Martin does find some of the tools in Photoshop helpful, such as the transform and copy functions, his designs always begin with a free hand drawing, either in his sketch book, or on a larger scale on his drawing board.