I've long wanted to do an imaginative piece that incorporated LED lights and even had some ideas in mind. One of those ideas was inspired more than four decades ago when I visited an abandoned gold mine on Quadra Island. It was called Lucky Jim's Gold mine. So that will be my next sample project.
Little about the actual mine I saw long ago will make it into the actual piece with the exception of the name... but it is a cool start. I spent a few minutes online looking for images of mine cars. I found two great photos that gave me the information I needed.
I wanted this display piece to be wider than it is tall. I grabbed my sketch book and started scribbling... I drew the drawing in two pieces, not concerned about fonts, or even scale at this point.
Then I imported the rough and quick sketches into PhotoShop to tidy things up a tad and then assemble the parts into one image. This is close enough to begin the actual design of the piece using vectors.
Because I'm not sure of the final size of the piece (and it does not matter) I'll build the mine car and figure first and then scale the background sections around that. I started with the vectors of the wheel - all work done using the drawing tools in EnRoute. In the next post I'll show how I created the wheel reliefs.
Stay tuned...
-dan
