What is the best medium for door hardware patterns

There is no correct answer to this question, but your choice will depend on your method of designing and your skill sets. The broad choice is between creating a pattern using traditional carving or modeling techniques versus 3D designing and printing.

Traditional techniques -

You can create a solid pattern by modelling the design in clay and by adding and removing clay to obtain the desired shape. We are sculptors by training and create our patterns using wood or jewelers wax or high-density rigid foam. Basswood carves well as it is a close grained soft wood but the grain is distracting, and its directional nature means you have to be an adept carver changing direction with your chisels as you follow the grain. When the wood pattern has been carved, we typically coat it with a matt grey primer which both fills the grain and helps us see any imperfections that need to be carved out and sanded. While Jewelers blue wax is dense and one can achieve good detail it is not as strong as basswood and is more brittle which makes it less ideal when creating fine deep lines. Moreover, even though free of grain it has a uniform color that has a pronounced sheen both of which make it difficult to see what has been carved.

As both wax and wood have drawbacks, we find ourselves increasingly turning to high density rigid foam a product often used in the film industry by set designers to create props. This medium is light weight, dense, grain-less and matt and carves beautifully. It is available in blocks and easy to cut and glue and moderately priced.

The Hawaiian bird pulls were ordered recently by designer Christina Hilt in Florida in warmer tones to compliment the golden burl wood in her client’s closet. A dark patina accentuates the detail in a piece but if the pattern is carved with a deep relief carving then these details will still be seen even where there is minimal patina and minimal tonal contrast as was the case with Christina’s order.

Pattern in high density foam with foam block

Contemporary 3D pattern making

 If you are adept in digital designing, then you would begin by designing your pattern in illustrator or Painter or other 3D program. On completion the design would need to be output as a STL file which could then be printed as an SLA print which is a photo polymer

Polynesian Inspired Cabinet Knobs

I recently stumbled upon early drawings that Martin Pierce did when commissioned to create a series of Hawaiian door and cabinet pulls for a residence in Kailua-Kona. In this post I will focus on how he developed the Double Headed and Single headed bird knobs.

When commissioned the scope of design for the cabinet pulls was to create 2 types of knob one 6”W x 2”H for the drawer fronts and the other 2”W x 2”H for the cabinet doors in a style loosely described as “nature based Hawaiian”. There were no other parameters which left the creative field open for birds, fish, people and plants as design starting points. Martin decided to proceed in 2 directions with a plant theme and a bird-animal theme, the former resulting in the orchid collection and the latter with 2 bird head knobs. For the bird knobs Martin turned to surfing the web looking for examples of Polynesian folk art and what he came away with was an image of highly stylized geometrically detailed work. With these thoughts he focused on the heavy beaked Takahe bird found in New Zealand, the most southern point of geographic area that makes up the Polynesian islands. This ground living bird has a rather thick head and thick beak and using this as the end of the drawer pull he designed geometric semi circles spreading out from the eye to depict swells of feathers that also look like breaking waves.

With the cabinet knob the beak and eye remain the focal point of the design but here a spiraling sea shell is used to form the birds tail.