"Blueprints and Models: Features of Artificial Geometry"

...When novice artisan crafters first try their hand at furniture design, they often struggle to grasp the difference between natural patterns and artificial shapes.
They painstakingly draw crests and patterns to overlay on their crafts, expecting them to be the finishing touch, only to make fools of themselves by accidentally creating artificial geometric shapes that look like equipment blueprints.

Ultimately, this is because they confuse naturally grown textures with shapes drawn for a specific purpose.
Crafting furniture and designing equipment are two different things: the lines on equipment often serve a practical purpose, while the patterns on furniture mostly serve an aesthetic function.
To make your patterns look more natural rather than like equipment, keep the following points in mind:

1. Avoid setting a purpose first.
Artificially designed shapes often have a clear purpose: you think of a shape first, then press it into the medium, so it naturally looks "carved in." Conversely, natural patterns seem to grow along with the material and structure.

2. Avoid pursuing consistency.
During your apprenticeship, mentors often teach you to make things symmetrical, neat, and easy to repeat. This is a useful principle for equipment, but when applied to decorations, it can easily cause them to become monotonous and rigid.
Natural patterns can approach geometry, of course, but their similarity comes from underlying rules rather than exact duplication; upon closer inspection, there are always slight differences.

3. Avoid making the edges too sharp.
The boundaries of natural textures are often transitional, scattered, worn, or covered, while artificially drawn edges tend to be clear, gathered, and truncated. The more an edge looks like a knife cut, the more unnatural it appears.

4. Avoid forcing hierarchical obedience.
Equipment graphics often emphasize an order of primary structure, secondary structure, and fine structure, with details serving the primary structure. The more you look at them, the more they look like a blueprint. Natural patterns are more prone to local, independent growth, without strictly requiring every layer to take orders from a center. The more obsessed you are with hierarchical order, the more mechanical the work will feel, pushing you further away from natural textures.

5. Trust your first intuition.
If a certain shape makes you feel unnatural, uncomfortable, or like it was carved out at first glance, it's probably not you overthinking it. Often, a key detail (symmetry, edge, repetition, or position) is just too clean.

Finally, do not overemphasize the importance of the pattern. The furniture is the purpose, and the pattern is merely the carrier.
But do not underestimate the danger of patterns either. If a certain pattern appears repeatedly across different materials, scales, and scenes,
and always appears in the most informative position, then it can be easily interpreted as a deliberately inscribed mark rather than a natural accident.