Upcycle Progress – Star Chart

I’m afraid that not much progress has been made on my part in the past week – I’ve been very busy with large pieces of work in other classes. Instead, I’m going to go over my design as it stands.

I’ve chosen to go with Orion and the caption ‘HOME’, per reasoning that you can read in my previous post. In order to engrave the constellation accurately, I will print out an actual chart of its stars to scale with the piece of wood I source, and mark the stars’ locations by using a punch through the paper onto the wood.

I will be doing the engraving by hand – as such, I need to carve out the letters by myself. I’ve been looking at the all-capitals captions in the science graphics shown in my last two posts, and trying out a few designs for the letters themselves. Most fonts used that I’ve seen are blocky and practical but still have flair in their use of serifs. See photos for my current design, which I’m still not quite satisfied with.

Further, I need to choose how the stars will appear. I plan on using a four-pointed star for each, as I imagine they are relatively simple to carve and fit the aesthetic well. By messing with a few sizes, I find that a slightly asymmetric 3 unit tall by 2 unit wide star looks the best to my eye.

I am not sure if I will have a carved border on the piece; if there is to be a border, it should not be rounded, as it gives a look that strays from the strictly rectangular book pages or posters that the 19th century science graphic is almost always printed in.

I would like to both stain the wood and paint the engraved sections black. I’ll do this by painting the entire front face, sanding until the wood reappears in all but the deep carved sections, and then stain the rest of the piece. I do worry if I don’t have enough woodworking experience to know what I’m doing here!

Next steps are simple, and I’ll be pushing for them more next week. I need to 1) talk to the wood shop(s) on campus to see if they have the scrap wood and/or tools that I can use, 2) source the piece of wood and cut it square, 3) print and punch the stars while laying out the area for the caption, 3) carve it all out, 4) paint and stain.

Lastly, I need to add photos to this post! I’ve got no progress yet, but design sketches and doodles in my papers.