Leather folding chairs can be both practical and beautiful. Folded up and out of the way when not in use, they can be quickly brought out for company or extra people at dinner. High-quality leather furniture is durable and easy to clean. There are two basic kinds of leather folding chair. The first type features four legs in a scissor mechanism with a leather-covered seat that folds down, while the other style is a loose sling made of leather that is supported by a rigid frame from which it hangs. Does this Spark an idea?
Instructions
Gather Information
1. Explore places where you will find leather chairs. Take a camera, a measuring tape and a sketch pad with you. You can look for design examples in furniture stores, pubs and bars and design boutiques.
2. Record chairs that strike your fancy by taking pictures and measurements and by sketching them in your sketchbook. Be sure to spend at least a few minutes sitting in the chairs you find in order to learn more about which styles are the most comfortable.
3. Spend some time in public libraries looking through furniture design books. If you live near a large university, visit its art library and find specialty picture books on furniture design, particularly ones focusing on the 1920s and '30s, Arts and Crafts furniture and Stickley design, all of which featured leather chairs quite prominently.
Design the Chair
4. Sketch some of your own ideas when you feel you have gathered enough information. Consult your photographs and drawings and modify the aspects of the pieces you like to create your own unique design.
5. Draw a large number of different variations of your idea in quick sketches in order to explore all the different possibilities of your creation. Modify it to be more conservative, more avant garde, higher, lower, uglier, more beautiful. Sketching is your chance to try everything out because it's fast and cheap, and if you ruin a sketch, you lose nothing except a little time.
6. Develop a formalized drawing of your chair design based on your sketches. Draw it more carefully than the sketches, using graph paper and measuring it to scale so that it suits the human body (see the References section for more information on drawing to scale).
7. Draw two complete formal drawings of your chair, one of a front view and one of a side view, complete with measurements of all relevant parts. Look at your drawing from the point of view of someone who is building the chair and ask yourself what the builder would need to know. Include everything necessary to the builder in the drawing.
Tags: furniture design, leather chairs, your chair