Though it may appear otherwise, I have not given up on the sketch a day. Recently I have been drawing in a sketch book in various places, like waiting rooms and such like. However I have been working digitally on something exciting….
An as yet unnamed female character just for practise, to try and see the differences between female and male body structure.
time taken: 20 mins
I used a revised scaling and positioning method where his chest and hips are separated. His chest is now a little too wide…
Took a little bit longer this time, to get it looking good. Still having problems with the size of his head on occasion… Perhaps my scaling method needs some adjustment…
time taken: 20mins
Eeech…I apologise for the awful drawing…proportion is all wrong and his punch is coming from the sky…
I am getting the hang of the planning process however and can do it at a decent speed. Now I just need to focus more on proportion.
time taken: 10mins
edit: better…but still requiring improvements…
The next step…re-drew the walking pose to practise it a bit more. Am much happier with the walk, but less happy with his face, it’s too big and doesn’t look enough like this as yet unnamed character.
time taken: 20mins
Same character as before but peacful now. First time I have drawn this pose and I can alrady see some improvements that are required.
I also chose to extend the time limit so as to be able to add shade to give a bit more clarity to the position of his limbs.
Time taken: 20mins
Another dynamic pose. Gotta work on those facial expressions though, can’t have him looking like he is squeezing out a painful turd all the time.
time taken: 15mins
I know, I know! It’s been almost three weeks since I posted anything. Ithere have been many things happening, but nothing much to do with drawing or with my boat so I thought I would spare you the drivel. I am editing my book. 100,000 words to edit, am about halfway through and needing (so far) to completely rewrite about 3-4000 of them. The rest are looking pretty well chosen (thank goodness!).
In boat news I got my copy of Hasler and McLeod’s Practical Junk Rig. Basically THE definitive tome on all things to do with Chinese style rigs. They are notoriously easy to sail, cheap to make and require minimum of stresses on both the hull and the sail. Perfect, no?
Thing is that my boat plans do not come with a junk option so I had to design one. It took all day and about eleven slightly different sails to arrive at the perfect configuration. I initially thought that you just plonk a siutable piece of cloth on a stick and call it a sail. Sadly it is about a hundred times more complicated and involves several things including your LWL, CLR, CE, rake and displacement (ballast in my case). You can see I am deliberately being cryptic.
Basically it is very important that the ‘average’ centre of pressure from the wind on the sail is more or less directly above the centre of lateral resistance of the hull. If not then your boat will not easily sail in a straight line, sacrificing speed and handling. If the point is too high above the boat then you will easily capsize, too low and you miss the swiftest winds. The height of your mast depends on the depth of your hull, so a little boat can’t have a tall mast because the mast will fall off and/or my boat will tip over in a gust. Finally the mast has to be the right proportions fore and aft of the mast to allow space for the rigging, and the right height above the boat to not hit you or trail in the water.
Anyway brace the contents of your various sphincters for the finished article!
I know…amazing…
Anyway, the important thing is I have plenty of sail (15 sq ft) and my CE is above my CLR, and my mast is a decent 19/20 ft. It should go like a scolded cat even in light breeze but I will have to reef early or risk taking a dip.
I was tempted by many things, extra masts, funky sail shapes, but I am going to keep it simple, this time.
Posted in Boat
Tagged boat, boat building, design, Junk rig, mastodon, New Zealand, proa, Salmo 19
The boat I designed doesn’t outright suck! Yay!
I spoke to the people on boatdesign.net and the comments were mainly about details. So I was very pleased that my little piece of egestion would go somewhere.
Of course there is a however. It was a half decent boat, however only really useful for lakes or protected waters. This was due to several of the design aspects including it’s long straight hull. I designed it like this because I can’t get my head around how to design curves that curve in two planes. I want to sail in the sea, and my boat would not have been able to cope with probably even average sized waves, or have been able to ride surf onto a beach.
Luckily for me a very helpful chap who runs the website tacking-outrigger.com pointed me towards a few excellent designs. I had lots of fun designing some (awful) boats, and I feel that thinking about all of the various aspects of design will undoubtably help me when it comes to the build. However I will leave the design in this instance to the pros.
In the end I chose this design: Salmo 19 by Andrzej Książyk. Here are some photos of it in action. Click for higher resolution.
As the name suggests it is 19′ long, weighs 185 kg and is a tacking outrigger. That means no shunting and no worrying about having to reverse the rig.
I will be making a few modifications. Firstly and most importantly for me I will be adding a ‘sacrificial’ keel to the underside so I can hit rocks and drag it up the beaches without too much worry.
Secondly I will be using a junk rig instead of the Gunter shown in the photos.
Thirdly I will be increasing the potential displacement of the outrigger by making it a bit taller. The benefits will be that I can carry more weight, and the crossbeams will be horizontal so I can attach a nice wide platform for chilling out.
Those are the ‘simple’ modifications and the ones that are guaranteed to happen.
After that I am considering raising the deck so it is more of a ‘sit on’ boat rather than a ‘sit in’ boat. This will give me more storage and less time bailing water. Plus then I can have ‘scuppers’ and a ‘poop deck’!
Finally I really do not like the idea of a keel stepped mast because it necessitates a hole in the deck, so I will see if there is a way for me to attach the mast to the forward crossbeam. This will be the most dificult thing to accomplish properly so I will spend plenty of time getting it right.
I bought the plans yesterday, and I bought a book about designing junk rigs for a bit of light reading.
One step closer.
Posted in Boat
Tagged boat, design, New Zealand, proa, Salmo 19, working holiday visa
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