The design behind the design

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:19:14 +0100

After spending a good part of my young adult life fishing northern Minnesota - mostly the Alexandria and Perham areas - I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to show with my tables. The hard part was how to make them look as real as possible.

After going over multiple scenarios, I decided to go back to the beginning and try to kick start my artistic vision. On the crappie table (which features a one and a half pound crappie in the table that i caught in Perham) the ideas were flowing faster than i could keep up with. That's when you start going through your memory bank: What did the water look like? Were there rocks, sand, weeds? Can I even come close to replicating the environment on a wood base?

The answer all around was yes. Crappies, depending on the time of year, travel between the deep open waters to the weed filled shallows. I decided to pick the spring trend just because a tables looks much better with the shallow structure versus deep open water.

So like a painter on a canvas, I started adding my structure and realized that there is no wrong structure\. Fish will be attracted to any type of structure. Once I stopped over thinking the table build moved ahead quickly.

I kept that table for personal use and started making plain water scene tables, tables with docks and then tables with fish. Then, one day I got an email from a lady in Maine who was following my table builds and she asked me if I could make a table for her boyfriend, who was a lobster fisherman.

The idea of this paralyzed me in the beginning. I felt like I was just getting freshwater scenery down and now I would have to figure out what a lobster may see on the bottom of the ocean. This brought on a whole bunch of different challenges: What does a lobster's environment look like? Are there different types of lobsters? What is the bottom structure? What about traps, ropes, buoys?

This was a lot to consume for a Minnesota born and raised boy. I had to take a step back and really do my home work. With the help of the internet and the customer it turned out pretty good. Thank God for Google: 48 different types of lobsters; many different colors, including blue-green, blue and red; and different bottom structures including sands, rocks and weeds.

Where this so called talent came from I still do not know, I guess the big guy upstairs decided to bring it out now.

Bringing nature inside

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 04:51:17 +0100

Hello, My name is Don Erickson and I started www.dderickson.com to bring a little nature inside through art.

Just to give you a little background on me, I am 47 years old and live with my wife of 25 years in Lakeville Minn. We have 2 boys, 24 and 21 years old. I am a avid fisherman and fishing collector. I have a room in my home that is dedicated to my years of fishing and fishing antiques. I have 113 antique fishing reels, around 100 lures, couple old boat motors and other odds and ends.

The whole idea for www.dderickson.com came from a boring weekend afternoon home alone 5 years ago. With my wife out of town and kids busy with work I found myself with nothing to do.

While sitting in my basement I noticed a large wooden boat shelf leaned up against the wall, which I had received the previous Christmas, and the idea was born. One of the rooms in my house was built like a cabin (wall to wall windows and cedar woodwork) which I had been decorating with my antique fishing collection that I had been gathering over the years.

Between my love of fishing and the lack of outdoors related furniture I thought that it could make a very cool table. Over the next few weeks, I would go in my basement after work - and when I had nothing to do on the weekends - and try to build myself a little bit of the lake front for my living room.

My first table, was a larger coffee table. It consisted of some of my antiques: A Billy bass and a sandpaper bottom. As I would walk by it different ideas would come to mind - rocks, weeds, smaller wooden and plastic fish. It slowly morphed into a lily pad crappie table.

I then realized I had other smaller boat shelves and no small end tables in my porch, so I went to work making smaller, more detailed boats from what I learned before.

After I finished with those, I sent some pictures to friends and family, who seemed impressed and interested, and I started making the tables for them as well. They helped grow my idea, with ideas of their own, like putting fish in scenes below the tables, and adding docks to the smaller tables. The docks not only added to the scenery (which I could now put more on the docks like benches and the like), but also made them more conventional, as they could be used as more table space as well.

Which brings us today - As the seasons change from snow and cold to rain and warmth, thoughts of open water, flying bobbers and splashing fish start to play in my head.

This starts the wheels of my artistic process and my mind starts to flood with my next table ideas. So many possible designs to pick from - The canoe quietly approaching a school of trout or the old wooden boat above the hungry walleye and bass chasing the same dinner.

In the weeks ahead I will unveil just a couple of the endless choices. I would love to hear your ideas and maybe bring nature inside for you.

I can be reached at ddericksonllc@gmail.com.

don-ericksons-blog

The design behind the design

Bringing nature inside