Constructing The Hand, Part 2: Basic Design

Yesterday, I introduced The Hand of Deucado and showed you the final design. Today I am going to show you how Bruce and I arrived at this unique structure.

The first thing I had to do was find a shoreline. I took this image from a snapshot of Presque Isle State Park on Lake Erie in Pennsylvania. I liked the interplay of shore, water and clouds. The only problem was shoreline needed to be rotated left by 90 degrees but that wasn't a big deal:



The next thing I needed was to find a general shape for the base of The Hand. I looked at many images of arches including The Gateway Arch in St. Louis until I came across the Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah. It was perfect. Here is an image of the arch and how I was able to extract the base structure using Paint Shop Pro:



Now I had the basic elements, now it was a time for a mock-up and supplying Bruce with the specific details.