Designing With Cogs

Following on from thinking about clocks, I pulled out this photo from my module 1 sketchbook. I took this on holiday in Venice a few years ago, in one of the churches. It is actually part of an old mechanism for the church bells - I am sure there is a proper name for this but I don't know it - rather than a clock but it has the lines and cogs I was thinking of. I had a little play with paper cutouts which I scanned in and manipulated in Paint Shop Pro. Here are the bits of paper on a black background.

Then I cut out some more and added some texture with gesso, gold spray paint, crackle medium and black paint on top - the picture doesn't show the gold cracks very well.

I combined this scan with a background that originated in my earlier work with pylon patterns - rubbings from folded paper scanned in and given a new colour scheme. I filled a layer with a metallic gold colour and masked it with the cog shapes so they take that colour and are slightly transparent. The second picture is the result of playing with preset displacement maps. I like the way the shapes extend out of the background in this one.

Finally (for the moment), a black and white study to look at layering the shapes. This is just the scan copied and pasted on top of itself, offset and cropped, with the layers given different amount of transparency. To make the shapes clearer and give more depth, I added drop shadows.