I connected with Michael this week. He showed me a pencil sketch over the computer diagrams he had prepared of the rosette and shared that he was thinking of the design of shoji screens when he came up with the "segmented" rosette, and was interested in how shoji screens connect to one another, and started to pencil in some ideas of how that might look.
Michael_Shoji_Sketch.jpg
I really took to this idea, but tried to come at it a different way - whereas Michael was interested in the frontal orthographic projection of a shoji screen, i.e., how it appears when you
stand in front of it, I found myself remembering my experience using shoji screen windows and doors during recent trips to Japan.
Often, these doors and windows are found
in Japanese houses in configurations of four, with two panels each mounted on two separate tracks. The panels slide in front of each other to allow different levels of light or views, or can be positioned side by side (i.e. four astride, albeit on two tracks) for complete privacy.
Drawing inspiration from the plan (top down) view of shoji screen doors/windows, I wondered what it would be like to conceive of the rosette as a top view of four "sliding" arcs - two outer arcs of walnut and two inner arcs of koa. The "gaps" in between "arcs" - ordinarily represented by tracks in true doors, are represented by maple segments.
A concept drawing for this took the following form.
Bashkin_Shoji_Concept_2.jpg
Finding this to be worth exploring, I then added segments to and colored in one of Michael's other graphic designs to attempt to visualize this better.
Bashkin Shoji Concept 2 Color + SH Binding.jpg
The dark pencil line around the sound hole reflects another idea Michael suggested - to bind the inside of the sound hole. You can see he toyed with this idea in the mock-up to the right of the one I colored in. To see how this looks on a Taylor 900 series,
click here.
Technically speaking, for the four arcs to line up to form a complete circle, each arc must correspond to a full quadrant of its corresponding concentric circle. I'm not sure we can achieve that in practice from an aesthetic perspective!
Nothing is final yet, but the good news is that with the incorporation of the maple "tracks" into the rosette design, and the shoji screen concept, I now have additional motifs to support the end graft design and back stripe design...