One of the hardest things to make when sketching a blueprint, model, or drawing is the circle. How is it possible after years of doodles in school, practice in college, and use in work that drawing a flawless circular is so difficult? Outside the few who may be able to nail all 360 degrees, the rest of us resort to using stencils, compasses, and the bottoms of tin cans to guide our pencils. This tool may simplify that.
Iris is a drawing tool meant to help you draw your dream circle. Created by London-based design studio Maker’s Cabinet, the tool isn’t as cumbersome as a tin can or as awkward to work with as a drawing compass, but it is very much like a stencil in that you trace around an adjustable circle to create a circle of your own.
Taking inspiration from the apertures found in cameras, the designers re-thought the mechanism as a bonafide drawing tool.
To use the Iris, you first find your circle’s center (and no, I’m not talking about yoga). A center point locator found on
A number of prototypes were made before deciding on the Iris’s final structure and materials. The finished product has an aperture made of brass and the adjusting inner leaves are made from stainless steel to keep them from rusting and getting damaged after being exposed to dozens of sketching graphite and ink. A scale laser etched onto the aperture denotes diameters up to the millimeter and is marked with a red dot to pay homage to the Iris’s camera origins. And keeping this whole thing in place while you draw are rubber pads which grip onto the surface you lay the Iris on.
It was completely funded on Kickstarter raising over $250,000 from over 1800 backers. You can find more details about the Iris drawing tool on Indiegogo and pre-order it for $109 (or two for $182) with an expected ship date of November 2019.
