Getting back to the 50-year wild partying here:

This picture is of the first nylon-string guitar I ever made. I made it in the late 1970s, for my stepmother, Virginia Carlson, as a way of paying my Dad back for his funding of my guitar-building education and purchasing of basic tools.
As with a lot of my work back then (some might say even to this day) I didn't really know what I was doing, but I winged my way through on passion and raw creativity, which I had a lot of both!
Western red cedar top, walnut back and sides. I designed a sort of fan-bracing for the top that necessarily, because of the unique sound-hole placement/design, was unlike any other classical guitar bracing.
It turned out to be a very pleasing instrument to play and hear; not a very powerful, dramatic sound, but warm and sweet. Perfect for my dear step-mom. After she passed away, my Dad gave it back to me, and I eventually re-sold it to a gentleman out here in California, who occasionally sends me pictures of it and tells me how much he loves it. Yay!!

In 1979 I built this asymmetrical steel-string guitar for my friend Russell Aminzade. I called it "The Juggler", imagining the ebony bridge to have hands that are juggling the stars-turning -into-birds motif that circles the sound-hole. The moon looks a bit surprised by it all. I recall it being very challenging to do those inlaid stars and birds...I used a knife and chisel, and the alternating soft and hard grains in the Sitka spruce top-wood make it very hard to get clean lines. But I never liked using Dremel (electric carving) tools, which would probably be what a smarter luthier would have used! Looks like I did OK, anyway.  This one had walnut back and sides, as I recall.

I was surprised when I came across this picture of another guitar I made in or around 1979, that it also clearly uses the "juggler" motif.  Here, it's even more obvious: the bridge has hands that are juggling the three sound-holes as though they were balls.  Some years earlier, as a teenager, I spent quite a while trying to learn how to juggle.  I did get so I could keep 3 balls going for a while, but never got to a point of being very good at it, or doing cool tricks.  At some point I came up with this visual idea of the bridge as hands juggling, and apparently I liked it enough to explore it on two rather different guitars.  

This instrument has a Western Red Cedar top, which is mostly what I'd been using for tops up to that point (around that time I began using spruce more); I think the back and sides were maple, but they may have been walnut; I can't recall for sure.  

I just got the urge to see them side by side, which for some reason never occurred to me before:

I'd love to hear them side by side, too!