The next critter sign is for a peddle buggy business which is a part of the park. I drew up the concept which the owner approved. It was decided to make the sign two sided which means the gear in the skeleton clock need to look good from both sides and the bear will be rotated 90 degrees. The concept sketch was all I needed to go on.
The lettering and basic shape of the sign was done in Illustrator. I then imported the ai file into EnRoute.
Using the drawing tools I created the basic fancy frame to support the gears. I also added the borders and rivets around the outside.
Creating the gears was pretty simple. I first drew a circle, then a rectangle. A second box was drawn as a measuring device for the next step. I centred all of the pieces with each other.
I then used the point edit tool to bend out the sides of the longer rectangle using the smaller box as a guide. There are more accurate ways of doing this procedure but this was plenty good.
And finally I combined the vector shapes to create a gear outline.
I used the combine tool with another circle (not shown) to create the spokes of the gear.
The smaller gear used similar functions with similar results.
I then positioned the gears and built new mounting points for them - all work done by eyeball.
These shapes were combined to approximate the result I wanted.
To make the routing and assembly easier I joined the small and large gears using a small rectangle before merging the pieces.
Next time I'll be showing how we create the reliefs and then in subsequent posts I'll show how we assemble and finish this sign. Stay tuned...
-dan