Amati Bros, part 2

I finished the drawing following the instructions in Fr. Denis' book, and here it is, overlaid on the back of the Amati Bros. violin featured on the Tarisio.com site.

Couple of cautions -- I scanned the sketch in two pieces, and there is a slight rotation problem between the two (upper and lower). I also had to really change the black-point of the sketch to get it to show in contrast to the background, which makes it a noisy image. Also, I had to scale up the Amati Bros/Tarisio image to 353 mm, the reported length of the back. I have no idea what type of distortions there might be in the original photo, nor how that might be magnified in my enlargement. So in many ways, I'm really shooting in the dark. I don't have too many authentic Amati Bros violins come into my shop to give me a better feeling for the design.

Note also that this overlay of the drawing is done on my computer in a simple image-processing program (Appleworks for Macintosh computers) and wasn't done in real life. What I do in real life is hold the two pieces of paper up against an outside window and move them about until I get the fit I like.

That said, I am fairly happy with the way the length and vertical marks came in -- the location of the corners, wide spots on the upper and lower bouts, mid-point of the c-bouts. If this mould drawing were really accurate to this violin back, the outline should lie basically on the purfling, with the exception of the corners where we expect some deviation. What I see, however, is that this drawing actually lies outside the upper and lower bout widths. So that's not great.

I'll also add I had to fudge the upper corner. I just couldn't figure out from Denis instructions how to place that recurve from the upper bout to the corner. Following the instructions -- as I understood them, I got something that was clearly wrong. Looking back through previous examples, trying things, still didn't work for me. I finally basically split the difference and drew them in.