Instructor - Craig Stevens

• We’ll be scheduling Designing Furniture again in 2025

Our Designing Furniture workshop is intended to help students learn to generate ideas and work through their own furniture designs. Through lectures, demonstrations, and some hands-on work on mockups, Craig will lead participants in addressing techniques and questions essential to one-of-a-kind furniture making. At some point, woodworkers will want to create their own pleasing designs, and this process-oriented course is aimed at developing the necessary skills to do so.

The focus of this course will be:

- generating ideas for furniture

- sketching and doodling those ideas into appealing and buildable pieces

- understanding perspective drawing, so the sketches look more realistic

- scaling sketches to determine starting point dimensions

- techniques for creating pleasing designs and proportions, including the importance of grain graphics

- building mockups with materials like inexpensive wood such as poplar, cardboard, screws, tape, and hot glue

The instructor will choose a smaller and approachable furniture piece like a side table to demonstrate the construction of a mockup. Students will then create mockups of that same piece, but they will base it on their own design ideas.

Sketching supplies are included in the course fee, including hard, medium, and soft drawing pencils, sketchbook, eraser, and a small pencil sharpener. There will be sketching assignments between classes.

This workshop is intended for woodworkers at any skill level.

We think this is a great opportunity for woodworkers to gain insight into proven methods for generating your own ideas. After studying with James Krenov at the College of the Redwoods, Craig spent his 25-year woodworking career designing and making one-of-a-kind furniture. He will share what he learned as a student and during his time making furniture.