I've been working with Brittney Townrow, our incredible indigenous education coordinator, on creating a workflow for paddle designs. Indigenous paddles are designed for steering canoes though can also be used for ceremonial purposes. They often have traditional stories or designs carved and/or painted onto them.
Brittney's research highlighted the uniqueness of each paddle's shape and design for it's purpose, such as speed or noise in the water. Artwork would reflect regional stories and often times be dependent on the type of wood used.
Cedar was the traditional material for it's durability and weather resistance. Since we can't cut cedar indoors I first turned to SPF lumber, the cheaper traditional stud lumber we used for student woodworking projects. Traditional carving techniques involve sharp blades and files and many hours of quality craftsmanship. Safety and timelines were, as always, our first thoughts in the classroom especially with an intended age range of Grade 4 (~8-9 years-old).
We experimented with creating templates children could draw on with sharpie. We lasercut four different outlines on 0.05" chipboard. This cardboard was stiff enough to have function but is a very fast material to lasercut so we had about 75 blanks in minutes. This worked well and pretty much any colouring medium could be used to decorate them. When we reflected on this I knew I wanted to give agency for kids to create their paddle from their own creativity, including the paddle shape. So instead of using a template was there a way they could design their own paddle from start to finish?
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| Templates on 0.05" chipboard |
The files created a lot of sawdust and fine dust particles and required lots of effort. It took me probably 15 minutes of hard work just to get one corner. The finished paddle was acceptable; it matched the shape of the paper template and just needed a quick sand to be smooth and presentable. However, the effort and tools required made it very clear it was not scalable to the level we wanted it to be.
So, we took a step back and reconsidered our resources. We started with presenting traditional and modern forms of paddles to students, along with their historical and cultural significance. Brittney had done great work exploring Haida shapes, for example, and students could draw from their own class research around importance of indigenous symbols. Students could then freeform draw their own paddle on paper and fineline their artwork inside the paddle. The completed paper drawings could then be scanned very quickly and saved as individual PNG files.
To vectorize these scanned images I created an Illustrator action:
- File > Place scanned PNG image
- Image Trace > Black and White logo
- adjust these settings for your scan:
- Simplify
- Noise
- Threshold
- Ensure you checkmark these settings. I had a huge problem with Illustrator creating double-paths stacked on top of each other on the same layer making it virtually impossible to detect. I had to manually select duplicate paths and delete them, a very onerous task!
- Create: Fills (no strokes)
- Ignore colour: white
- Expand
- Ungroup
- Release compound paths
- Select all paths, remove fill and set stroke colour to green (score) and .25 size
- Select outside line, set to red (cut)
- Group
I did notice that my action would sometimes skip a step which was quite annoying. I chalk it up to the age of my Macbook (2018 and still rocking!) Once you have the vectorized paddle you can arrange them on one artboard for cutting. If you're anything like me you'll spend more time arranging and squishing everything to use up every last square inch of material so there's no wastage. One important consideration is wood grain: it should run top to bottom of your paddles for strength.
