Violin Wood-Nail-String Art

7/4/18

    I’ve been a counselor at this camp for the past few days which means that I’ve been pretty busy and will be for the next few days as well. However, today was the fourth of July, which means that we didn’t really have camp today. So I decided that it was about time for me to do this project I’d been thinking about for a while. You might not remember it, but I’m sure you’ve seen this type of thing before. Basically, it’s a piece of wood with some nails in it, outlining a shape. Then there’s a piece of string, or twine, or thread wound around and between the nails. It makes an abstract, crisscrossed shading of the shape. I didn’t think that this would be too hard. All I needed was wood, nails, a hammer, and some string. So I chose the shape of a violin, which I think has a really beautiful shape.

    I’ve never been very good at drawing violins, so instead of penciling it onto my wood, or even just hammering nails in as I went, I printed out the silhouette of a violin and taped it to my surface.

    Then I sat down for three or four hours to meticulously hammer in the nails (the tuning pegs were a nightmare), tear the paper off, and add the string.

Here is picture of me, about half an hour in.

    After that I had dinner before adding the final touches. I’d had the plan to do this for a couple days now, so I knew what I wanted to do. I used a pretty light wood, and black string to fill it in. Then I added white string for the violin strings, which I attached to nails that imitate the fine tuners of the violin. Eventually I plan to make another one of a guitar, but on dark wood, white string to fill it in, and black for the strings.

    For now, I’m letting my fingers rest.

I'm super happy with the final product.