Federal Style Patterns

The Amory-Ticknor House. This drawing does not appear in the book but is included here because it is a good example of how PowerCADD and WildTools can be used to produce a very complex drawing by drawing small parts and duplicating them. This is a view of how the Amory-Ticknor house in Boston, Massachusetts might have looked in 1804 when it was designed by Charles Bulfinch. The demise of this home began when the bottom floor was converted into storefronts in 1885. Today, the house is hardly recognizable as only the left half of the porch remains, and due to the addition of a mansard roof and the application of bay windows, the main cornice and most of the wrought-iron balconies are long gone. However, using HABS photographs, Frank Chouteau Brown’s measured drawing, and our own photographs, this drawing was made. We found the missing main cornice in Asher Benjamin’s 1806 edition of The American Builder’s Companion, and were able to draw the lost wrought-iron balconies because we took photographs of the same pattern on other nearby Beacon Hill houses. Great tools and a little detective work made for a fun project.

I draw using a Cinema screen monitor and a small Wacom tablet. I found that the pen felt too slick on the plastic tablet, and it was too hard for me to control. I taped a piece of paper to it to provide some resistance and my drawing improved rapidly. After I learned to draw the swags, acanthus leaves, husk flowers, and other details of Federal Style ornament, I followed this process: I opened the profile drawing that Larry had made, duplicated the profile and connected the two profiles with lines to form an elevation view, and then printed it. I then sketched the single examples of ornament onto the elevation, scanned the drawing back in, and used WildTools to trace over my sketch and to duplicate and repeat the ornament. The sheaf of wheat [below] that appears in the mantel on the cover of the book was my first illustration.

Larry brings the precision and accuracy demanded by wood-working to his drawings in PowerCADD. All drawings begin on the grid, the grid is set to 32nds, and to check his drawings, the dimension tools are set to 512ths. Though it seemed bewildering to us both at first, Larry quickly became adept at using the WildTools Pen tool and found it indispensable. Because he learned to draw on the drafting board first, he knew the location and direction of the tangent lines for all of the curved moldings of the Federal Style (ogees, ovolos, scotias, etc.) For him, it was a snap to use the Pen tool to place the anchor points and control handles tangent line locations.

The Pen tool also allowed far more freedom and accuracy that Rapidograph pens and ellipse templates had: Larry could now use his cabinetmaker’s eye to draw curves that he knew were true to the Federal Style and could be reproduced by modern machinery. The math functions of the Edit Window, PowerCADD’s Duplicate command, and WildTools Linear Patterning and Scale tools have saved Larry hundreds of hours of drafting time. Quick work is made of difficult geometry puzzles such as the reeds and rosettes that are duplicated and rotated along the arc on the Gardner-White-Pingree House [below] or flutes containing reeds that need to be laid out precisely around a diminishing round column.

Larry draws using the largest Wacom tablet and the mouse that came with it. This mouse/tablet combination and the PowerCADD snapping function makes it very easy to quickly draw with a high level of accuracy. He has programmed most of his operations into key commands, and because of a serious rotator cuff injury caused by extending and twisting his arm to reach the keys, works with the keyboard on his lap (non-skid rubber strips affixed to the underside keep it from slipping off) and an X-keys device.

At first, the large Wacom tablet seemed impossible to use because the monitor had to be placed too far away. An articulating monitor arm made by Marathon computer solved this dilemma. By adjusting the arm, Larry found the ideal viewing distance and had a spare pair of eyeglasses ground with the same focal length. A second monitor keeps all of the tool palettes in easy reach and Finder windows display the contents of external FireWire hard drives that contain our digital desktop reference library of photographs, measured drawings, and rare pattern books that we have scanned in.

Gardner-White-Pingree House Arch. This tricky display of reeds and rosettes duplicated and rotated along a curve required a little trial and error to ensure that the design began and ended with reeds and that a rosette ended up in the center. WildTools Linear Patterning tool and Rubber Stamp to the rescue! Using the Arc by Chord tool, an arc was drawn that extended beyond the right hand capital, one set of reeds and one rosette was grouped, picked up with the Rubber Stamp tool, and then duplicated along the curve with the Linear Patterning tool. The enlarged detail is another marvel of drawing with PowerCADD. It is, of course, simply a duplicate of a portion of the drawing increased to half size with the WildTools Scale tool.

Objects placed by the Linear Patterning Tool along the arc.

A close-up of the capital.