A Day With A Dynamo - Cindy Drozda

Elegant, delicate, beautiful, intriqueing, perfectly proportioned - with a hidden surprise - descriptors of a Cindy Drozda piece.

Precision, control, an eye for perfect proportions and seeing "fair curves", combined with the eye-hand coordination, mind, discipline and techniques to create them, plus a real passion for turning - descriptors of Cindy Drozda the wood turner.

Enthusiastic, extremely well prepared, inspirational, great communication skills with words, gestures, facial expressions, drawings, always open for questions - descriptors of Cindy Drozsa the teacher.

Put all that together and you've got - A Day With A Dynamo.

The Dynamo
The Dynamo's Demonstration Pieces

If you just took notes on all the ways she uses to hold a piece during its creatiion you'd end the day with a lot of very valuable information - and pages and pages of notes and sketches. If you have a camera you'll probably have two or three dozen photos to study at your leisure later. And only after you've studied the pictures fleshed out your cryptic notes and redrawn your sketches - filling in details and adding notes - will you begin to appreciate what you witnessed - and begin to understand how ingeniously developed and refined Cindy Drozda's work is and how precise and controlled her tool techniques are. And if she can't get the cut she needs with one of her current tools - well she'll make the tool she needs - like this one for example.

(click on the image for a BIGGER, more detailed image of this tool)

Lets start with the myrtle finial lidded box, with padouk "rim" and foot. Ordinarily, you'd have a "bottom", a "lid" and an attached finial. By having a separate finial - if you don't like it you can turn another one, and perhaps one after that - trying until you've got one that goes with the box. Cindy choses to integrate the finial with the lid - a much riskier proposition - for two reasons. If you blow the finial, which is turned first - or blow the lid fit after getting the finial just right - you get to start all over. There isn't an Undo or Do Over option in turning.

Here's the finished piece shown a bit larger than it actually is. There's a lot that went into this piece, both in terms of the proportions, the curves which make it up, the cuts requjired as well as the chucking and turning sequence necessary to turn it. Only after studying this piece, and what's required to turn it can you begin to appreciate what Cindy Drozda brings to her works.

So let's study this piece and see some of the underlying details of what makes it so pleasing to the eye. Figure A below shows the parts of this piece. Figure B shows the curves and proportions of the piece. Click on either to see a larger version of the Parts or the Curves & Proportions illustration. (close that window when you're done with it)

If you're interested in having a go at turning this type of Finialed Lidded Box was done CLICK HERE for more How To (as in three pages of illustrated sequencea - with notes!). You will see that Cindy Drozda has a LOT of ways to hold a part in order to turn it - the way it needs to be turned

By replacing the "foot" with a small finial and turning the piece upside down it'd make a very elegant Chritstmas Tree Ornament - just in case you're not interested in doing lidded boxes.

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