Over the past year and a half I've been playing around with ideas for a rosette design from different mosaic, as well as solid wood, center motifs, to various borders, etc. etc. but, to a great extend I was never really exited about what I came up with.
Then, one day I stumbled over a website of a luthier called Joshua Alexander French whose rosettes greatly appealed to me. French studied guitar making with Jose Romanillos, and Romanillos influenced French' own method of approach, a design made from tiles constructed from 'solid' pieces of wood rather than the traditional mosaic tile made of veneer slivers.
With this design I have tried to do my own spin on the 'solid' wood tile. Most notably I have moved the center of the tiles taper away from the center of the rosette itself, resulting in a parallelogram shaped tile rather than the typical rectangle or a square tile.
It has been my ambition to create a design where the connection of the individual tiles should be completely seamless, resulting in a motif that will appear as a continuous one rather than a design made from repeated segments. With this particular design, an 'overlapping' motif consisting of two identical halfs, this should be possible, or, at least the transition from one tile to the next should not become an obvious one.
After I had finalized my design however, I realized that this would present it's own unique challenges, when it comes to tapering the tile so they will form a circle when they are put together. With mosaic tiles this is typically done either after the tile is constructed or all the tiles vertical columns are tapered evenly before it is glue together. With this method it will be necessary to 'build' the taper into the vertical tile parts and adjusting the horizontal ones accordingly.
Then, one day I stumbled over a website of a luthier called Joshua Alexander French whose rosettes greatly appealed to me. French studied guitar making with Jose Romanillos, and Romanillos influenced French' own method of approach, a design made from tiles constructed from 'solid' pieces of wood rather than the traditional mosaic tile made of veneer slivers.
With this design I have tried to do my own spin on the 'solid' wood tile. Most notably I have moved the center of the tiles taper away from the center of the rosette itself, resulting in a parallelogram shaped tile rather than the typical rectangle or a square tile.
It has been my ambition to create a design where the connection of the individual tiles should be completely seamless, resulting in a motif that will appear as a continuous one rather than a design made from repeated segments. With this particular design, an 'overlapping' motif consisting of two identical halfs, this should be possible, or, at least the transition from one tile to the next should not become an obvious one.
After I had finalized my design however, I realized that this would present it's own unique challenges, when it comes to tapering the tile so they will form a circle when they are put together. With mosaic tiles this is typically done either after the tile is constructed or all the tiles vertical columns are tapered evenly before it is glue together. With this method it will be necessary to 'build' the taper into the vertical tile parts and adjusting the horizontal ones accordingly.
PRELIMINARY SKETCHES
DIFFERENT COLOR SCHEMES
FINAL DESIGN
