The project of making Eurythmy Figures requires several artistic choices.
The first one had to do with how to handle the sketches. Rudolf Steiner drew his sketches for the eurythmy figures freehand. This means that the lines, and especially the outlines, have a nice organic wavering form, and are not exactly straight. If you are cutting them with a bandsaw it would be hard to preserve the exact outline. But a laser cutter is precise to a fraction of a millimeter. So the artistic question is whether to straighten the outlines, or leave the rougher and more organic pencil lines exactly as they were.
I opted to leave the outlines exactly (to a fraction of a millimeter) as Rudolf Steiner had drawn them. It would not have been difficult to make the lines exactly straight, either using a ruler in the initial phase, or by using digital editing tools in the step before the file goes to the laser cutter. But my sensibility was that the forms felt more natural when you left the hand drawn lines as they were.
There is a somewhat different challenge with the shapes of the figures inside of the outline. Here you are working freehand with wet ink that dries quickly. How precisely is it even possible to follow Steiner’s inner lines? I did consider methods like a projector or various forms of carbon paper, but decided in the end to go with my own freehand line work.
I gave myself permission to take these liberties after looking carefully at multiple variations made by Steiner’s original collaborators. They too were working with these sketches Steiner had handed them, and they too were struggling with the various ways of implementing his ideas into a finished piece. By looking at how different many of these early figures were from each other—both in color and in form—I decided the proper approach would be to do my best the way the earlier artists had done their best. This ultimately means that each of my figures, while having exactly the same outline, is individual at the level of coloring.