Furniture Design

Designing a piece of furniture is something many of us dream of but aren’t sure where to start. We have devised this course to help you develop your own ideas and get them down on paper or create a 3d model.

Pencil and paper is the starting point for most furniture designs. It allows you to let your imagination take flight without getting too worried about the dimensions or the quality of the drawing. Designing is about inspiration and using your real-world experiences to come up with a unique solution to a problem.

Your task will be to design a small table using a series of rough sketches; eventually choosing one of these ideas to develop into a more complete design; by the end of the course, we hope you will have a working drawing to take away and turn into the real thing during our supervised access sessions.

Along the way, we will look at practical considerations such as the height of a piece, and how to determine the sizes of the structural elements.

We will also explore how proportion can be used to add balance and harmony to your designs.

But I Can’t Draw!!!!!!!

The idea of drawing can be intimidating, but we want to assure you that you don’t have to be “good” at drawing to benefit from this class.

Messy rough scribbles are perfect for getting ideas out of your head and on to the page; a lot of them will be useless, and that’s okay, they don’t all have to be brilliant. So don’t worry if you draw like a five-year-old, even they have genius ideas.

We recommend Betty Edwards – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – an excellent workbook to help you become a better sketcher.

Computer-Aided Design

We will be using analogue design methods on this course – pen, paper, card and balsa wood. If you want to learn more about designing using computing packages there are many good ones including Fusion 360 and Sketch-up with free or inexpensive online lessons to match.