Hey, someone has finally used my technique to make a shingle sculpture. It’s the first one I know of at least. Maybe some of you River Festers are holding out on us. As compensation I have a complimentary fishing trip if I ever get to Alaska. Here are a couple of pictures and the email that he sent me.
Hi Roger, Here’s a couple pictures of the completed fish. Couldn’t get
white cedar shingles. Could’ve used yellow cedar but here we always have
to put some type of sealer on the the red cedar shingles, they don’t
weather here like white cedar on the cape, so when it warms up enough to
paint we’ll use some semi transparent stains on the different parts of
the fish.
The hardest part was the different layers necessary to make it all work.
I figured some of the areas are probably at least 8 shingles deep.
Can’t tell you how much help your pictures and short article were! Just
having the design for the scales saved me hours. I made a jig/ template
that I put the shingles in and had a laborer cut them out. I probably
have about 60 hours into it. The next one will be quicker.
When we get some stains on I’ll send more pictures. That’s a few months
away.
Thank You again for all your help. Paul Carter
“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Ambrose Bierce
Replies
how about posting the pics/article you sent this guy?
bozer,
Here's what I sent him. It's a short version of what I sent to FHB but they didn't use it because they had done a shingle story a few years before.
The elevation drawings for our garage showed a rather large blank area above the doors that just didn’t feel "right." After tossing around a few ideas on how to fill the space we converged on the idea of making a picture in shingles. Being an avid fisherman, I half-jokingly suggested a striped bass, which is by far the sporting fish of choice on Cape Cod. My wife, being an involuntary fishing widow during striper season, surprised me by saying that she thought it was a great idea.
The first step was to find a picture of a striped bass to serve as a model for the shingle mural. That was accomplished by searching through ads and articles in some of my old fishing magazines. By looking at several samples it was possible to find a picture that distilled the essence of what makes a striper look like a striper and yet wasn’t overly complicated. The next trick was to figure out how to get the image from the piece of paper onto the wall.
That was done using an age-old artist’s trick for painting large wall murals. Basically, it starts with a smaller version of the image drawn on paper. A scaling technique is then used to project a larger version of the image onto the wall.
The scaling technique involves drawing a grid over the smaller picture and a similar grid with larger "cells" on the wall. The next step is to locate where distinctive features on the smaller picture, such as a defining curve, intersect the grid and then mark the wall grid in the corresponding locations. The image on the wall can then be completed by "connecting the dots" to match the features on the drawing. For a shingle mural, you can draw the same features on shingles, cut them with a scroll saw, and then nail them onto the wall in the right places.
For a shingle mural, it makes sense to select a grid size on the wall that corresponds to the weather exposure of each row of shingles, nominally 5 inches. We decided that we wanted the finished fish mural to be 10 feet wide by 4 feet high. In inches, of course, that would be 120 inches wide by 48 inches high. Dividing those dimensions by the 5-inch cell size meant that I needed a grid that was 24 cells wide and 10 cells high.
Armed with that information, I scanned the striper picture into my computer to enlarge it to a more workable size and used a drawing program to lay out a grid that was 24 cells wide and 10 cells high. Each of the horizontal and vertical lines was numbered to make it easier to transfer the points. (You don’t really need a computer. The grid can be drawn directly on a picture by hand.)
After printing a copy of the "gridded" fish, it was time to start working on the wall of the garage. Shingles were installed in the usual manner up to the height where the fish would be started. The next step was to locate the center of the wall and draw the first vertical grid line using a 4-foot level. The other vertical lines were added at 5-inch increments to the left and right. The horizontal lines were snapped at the normal 5-inch row heights.
The striper was built row by row from the bottom up. The intersections of the fish’s primary curves with the grid on the drawing were transferred to the corresponding locations on the wall and the shapes were drawn by hand between the dots through the time-honored process of "eye-balling it." A shingle of the appropriate type (red or white cedar) was held in place and the curves were hand drawn on the shingle to match the pattern on the wall. The shingle was then carefully cut using a hand-held scroll saw and nailed in place. Red cedar was used for the darker areas to contrast with white cedar for the lighter areas.
As might be expected, drawing the curves on the wall and then on the shingles comes the closest to what might be called "art." And anyone trying this on a complex pattern should expect to have a few shingles that need to be cut two or three times before they’re perfect. But overall the process is simple enough to be mastered by anyone who is marginally proficient at arts and crafts.
The process of building the fish was sped up a bit by making a pattern for the many fish scales that comprise most of the mid-section. There was no existing "fish scale" pattern that looked quite right so I created my own through trial and error. Producing several hundred copies of the fish scale was easily the most boring part of the project. In contrast, the striper’s head was the most challenging, and the most fun.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Ambrose Bierce
Looks terrific!
I'm still awed by the pics you posted a few years ago, the whale tail, etc.
Beautiful stuff...
Mongo
Thanks, Mongo. I have nothing to shingle here in Euro land! Maybe when I get back to the US next year.
I see that the pics didn't post in the article post. I'll have to find them. But it's time for din-din here so I'll edit it tomorrow."War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Ambrose Bierce