A bit of excitement

Today was an exciting day. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I got excited today about an idea. One of the things I loved about teaching was getting together with other teachers and planning. Someone would have an idea and someone else would build on it. Then someone else would tweak it and so it would go. I love that kind of stuff but there hasn’t been very much of it in my retired life and, particularly with Covid 19 causing me to be less mobile, I confess to getting a lot of my mental stimulation from YouTube. Of course, there is a lot of interesting content there and also a ton of crap. Yesterday I decided I was wasting time looking deeper and deeper into my feed trying to find something interesting instead of just shutting down the computer and going and DOING something interesting. YouTube and Facebook are a bit like playing the slots but that’s for another post.

In 2013 and 2014 I became fascinated by mandalas and even provoked the tendon in my arm because I did so much work with coloured pencils. After a while I didn’t draw mandalas anymore. I still liked them but other things took my time. I decided to fish out the coloured pencils and have another go. I got started on a mandala design and enjoyed it just as much as when I worked at them before, but making mandalas isn’t the reason I got so excited.

As you know I’m learning to build ukuleles and as Jake and I work together more we find that we spontaneously build on each other’s ideas. I travel once a week to work with him and in between times we often text about what we’re up to. This morning Jake sent me a text of his work space commenting that it was messy. Well, my bench in the shop is relatively tidy at this moment but my desk is another story. I have the huge box of coloured pencils taken apart and spread over the desk. There are pencils, erasers and various drawing tools to complete the chaos. I decided to send Jake a photo of my mess.

He commented that the mandala sitting in the centre of the mess would make a great design for an instrument's sound hole. Since I blend two or three colours in each of the segments, I didn’t see how it would be possible to replicate the mandala or part of it using traditional inlay techniques and I dismissed it - for about 2 minutes. Then I got to wondering, what if I designed a mandala-like circle to go around the sound hole, coloured it with coloured pencils and used epoxy over top to seal it and to give enough thickness so it could be sanded along with the instrument’s top. The card stock I use is fairly substantial and acid-free. I think my set of pencils is of archival quality and if they’re not I know I can buy ones that are.

First attempt

I was off on a rush of possibilities. It’s not the traditional way to make rosettes but it’s still original art. Each one would be unique. What fun it would be to have all those colours at my fingertips when making a design to go around the sound hole! I left the original mandala and started to play with circles about the size of the sound hole in a tenor uke. It’s easier to start bigger and figure out some of the logistics, then I can adapt to smaller sound holes. I decided to use warm colours because they are not as common as the greens and blues of the shell traditionally used in inlay work and I wanted to emphasize, in my own mind if nothing else, the difference between what I was doing and what is traditionally done. I ended up introducing some cooler colours and I don’t much like the first attempt. I’ll let the ideas percolate for a couple of days and then try again. In the meantime I can experiment with an epoxy coating on the first one. I think we can find a way to get this to work and I’m pretty excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned.