Thumbscrews

After the struggles with cutting the garrotte, I moved on to the thumbscrews instead. I was feeling more positive after the whole Krampus thing, but this ended up almost driving me insane! I drew it and redesigned and redrew and threw away the sketches then redrew it again.. all in all I think it was redrawn about 7 times.

I recut it 3 times too.. but am still unhappy with the outcome. Really unhappy actually, the more I look at it the more I despise everything about it.

Problems

I had real issues trying to create sharp angles, and clean, straight lines.

I switched to using a new U blade for some details, and found that it kept undercutting sections too much and making it hard to get really crisp edges. I was testing it out because I hadn't used it before but realised that the V tools are the best for the really sharp corners.

Some of my tools are getting blunt and need sharpening (getting a sharpening stone thing for xmas) so they're dragging slightly.

Solutions

Keep going? Redraw again? Probably best to move on to another design

Test different blades on spare lino. I don't know why I tried to use it straight up on the real thing.

Sharpen dull blades!!

Work on getting more control for straight lines using other hand pressing against the top of cutter blade

Use a craft knife on some edges and corners

Cut alongside a metal ruler for longer straight lines

I found this really frustrating because after my little epiphany the other day, I couldn't get this to work agian.

BUT the shapes aren't flowing / natural and it has way more clean angles. If I draw a curve a little wrong, I can work with it, but if I bugger up straight lines and make angles wonky etc it sticks out like a sore thumb.

It sounds blatant but it's taken me a while to realise that 99% of the time, when the cut isn't working it's because the design isn't good enough. So I need to redesign this and revisit it, but for now I'm going to stop looking at it before I hurl all the drawings out of the window.