Help, please: Stanley # 2 plane-

[Cloudy]

This is what I've done so far- and am stuck on how to continue- I'm not very comfortable with what I've done with the large scrolls flanking the monogram... what can I do to fix this up?
Thanks!

 

[eastslope]

You could put a small scroll between the C and the K on each side within the monogram border, originating off the border. This might help offset the weight of the large scrolls. It looks pretty darn good right now, and this is just my 2 cents, and that isn't much. You could prints off the picture and draw the scroll in and see how it looks. Seth

 

[richard hall]

Maybe some dots in the border around the monogram might even help ...

 

[Jim Sackett]

Just thread the body strokes.

Check out Sams tutorial on threading and make your monogram pop.

Jim

 

[Ron Smith]

Cloudy,

You can't do much about this now as is, but within a border or frame, there should be an imaginary line that the monogram stays within, and no part coming all the way to the border or frame. I think a bolder monogram would also be better, for instance some mass to the stems of the letter, threading, outlining and fill, cross shading, or stipple, etc. It looks a little enimic compared to the surrounding designs. Might that be what is bothering you?

Ron S

 

[Cloudy]

Thanks- I was mostly concerned with the 2 large scrolls- are they too large? Should I have designed them otherwise? If the size is okay- how should I have handles the tendrils????

 

[pilkguns]

The two big scrolls are not too big, but they appear to have a different leaf style than the rest of the pattern, or their background ratios are much different from the rest of the pattern and therefore don't quite fit into the rest of scrolls.
They definately look "whiter" than the rest of the pattern.

I wonder why you chose to offset the monogram circle? To me, (unless there a mechanical issues I can't see such as a screw) I would have placed the circle equally in the center and then both scroll sets would be a mirror image of each other. It's not really wrong how its laid out, but to me it would have been simpler and maybe more pleasing to the eye with a centered patten since the plane is an equal shape.

Some other observations, FWIW. Scrolls 1 and 2 are flowing in the right direction in the way they come of the big scrolls, but overall IMO they look backward going against the "overall flow" of the whole pattern. It would have been better to have used these same exact scrolls, except reversed so that they came off the monogram circle the same as the big scrolls. I probably would have done the same thing with scrolls 4 and 5, having them originate from the monogram circle as well, but 4 and 5 are really Okay looking in the pattern as drawn.. Scroll 3 is kindof a mystery, not sure if its supposed to be coming from 2 or the monogram circle, but it definitely should be coming from the monogram circle in a more defined way.

Background areas normally should be roughly equal throughout the pattern, so that your light to dark ratio is a constant. You can see some big differences in the Xs, as they represent 3 sucessively smaller patches. Yes, its true that as scrolls diminish in size then the background will too, but depening on how your do your layout, the background ratio shuld be similar. Probably if it was me, I might have made an extra rotation on the big scrolls so that the leaves would have been closer to the same size.

 

[Cloudy]

Thanks! Yes, it was operator error in centering...