Draw Full-size Plans With Your Television

You can turn any digital photo of a piece of furniture into a full-size drawing with the help of your television set, a piece of Plexiglas and some tracing paper. Here’s how.

When I travel, I take lots of photos of furniture that I want to study later on. When I discover a particularly nice piece, I try to take four photos of it – an elevation, plan, profile and three-quarters view of the piece. These views allow me to study the piece at home – almost as if it was in front of me.

When I get home, the first thing I do is use “perspective warp” in Photoshop to correct for any parallax in the photo or to alter my photo if it wasn’t taken dead-on straight. The perspective warp function can present the facade of a piece of furniture in a flat plane, which makes it easy to study.

Then I put my television on its back, cover its screen with Plexiglas and project my photos onto the screen of the TV. I can adjust the size of the photos until they are projected full-size (or half-size for big pieces). Then it’s a simple matter of tracing the details I want to study.

In the examples shown in the photos, I knew how wide the chair’s seat was, so I projected it on the screen until it matched that width. Then I traced all the details. You’ll quickly learn that you have to adjust the size of the photo if you need to capture things that aren’t in the same plane. For example, in the photos here, I had to change the scale of the photo for the armbow and the seat.

While I could use these tracings to create patterns directly, I prefer to spend some time figuring out the underlying method the original maker used to create the different shapes. In this chair, the seat is actually made up of two different rectangles and two identical pie-shaped pieces.

Knowing this was the system he or she used is far better information than a simple tracing. This knowledge allows me to easily adapt the shape to suit other pieces of furniture, such as a settee.

I know there are lots of ways to do this process, including camera obscura-type devices and projectors. This approach cost me almost nothing – just a piece of plastic and a roll of tracing paper (I already own a laptop and a TV). And it works brilliantly.

— Christopher Schwarz