Faces

I'm forgetting to post my work. This is the first face I carved. With input from Rick. Now, when I find the next two I made for some friends.

Starting Carol's Critters

Just managed to create an acceptable Pug...it only took 5 starts and endless hourrs looking at photo's.

This is made out of cottonwood bark with a stone for the nose. it's polished using Kiwi Shoe Polish in dark brown and natural.

Applying shoe polish to to the carving is best done on a really hot day. It is easiest if the wood is warm and the polish is totally melted. I use a toothbrush to apply it. Let it sit for a while and then buff with a shoe brush or a soft cloth. The melted polish made it tricky to get the black applied in selected locations.

Starting work on a mask

This is very exciting. Rick just gave me a blank for a big mask. Its red cedar - yay. I do love carving red cedar. Every cut smells so nice and is so beautiful. And I've been wanting to start a mask. The only challenge will be to finish the birch platter and not totally focus on the mask. 

Here's what the blank looks like - its almost ready to start carving. I added a pop can to one photo because I was having a hard time showing the scale. The can makes it look ginormous. 

Catching up

It has been a long time since I posted here but I just have to catch up for the sake of my distant friends.

At some point last fall, I decided that I wanted my cedar log to stand up so the leaf design was not going to work. I struggled with it for a while and settled on a change to fish.

Here is one of the last photos of the project before I 'erased' it and started again.

I'm back - birch fish platter

Just downloaded a blogger app so I'm hoping my blogging woes will be fixed.

So, where am I ...stopped working on the log when I was diverted by  a piece of birch from my daughters tree. Although it's still not complete, I am astonished when I look at the current state and realize that it was a hunk of wood when I started...and I haven't used one power tool in getting all the extra wood out.

The final product will be a sushi platter resting on two salmon. These photos are not current but they give you an idea of where I'm going with this.

Before:

Worm damage visible once the bark was removed:

Top view, work in progress:

Side view:

Moving right along...not

Okay it's not moving fast. And what's worse, I was so enthralled with the beauty of the wood, I sorta forgot I was working on leaves. Yeesh!  So my latest leaf is quite a marvel with scalloped edges and colour variations but it doesn't really look much like a leaf. And I really want to go back and work on leaf #2 but I have to keep reminding myself to continue with the rough work now and wait until the next pass when I will have more skill. Self restraint isn't my greatest strength.

I'll add a photo of my newest and greatest leaf. Hopefully tomorrow.

Down To Business

Well it's been a little while but I'm still totally excited about the project, I just can't get to it as often as I'd like. So now I'm down to the carving but as I've realized you need a plan. And what is easy to sketch isn't always easy to carve. Okay, for me, there isn't much that is easy to carve but anyway...here is the sketch that is the inspiration for the carving

I hope I can capture the energy of real leaves in the carving, and get the scale right.Now that I've started the carving I've already realized that I get to work in more dimensions so I have to think more about foreground and background and whether the leaves will curl in or out....OMG my head is spinning. It's definitely slowing down the actual carving having to think about all this stuff. Oh yah, so did I mention that one of the biggest mistakes beginning carvers make is not sharpening their tools often enough. Rick tells me that I should sharpen every 20 minutes while carving. Of course, I move so much more slowly than he does that maybe I could get away with every 30 minutes or maybe every 40 minutes. Ha ha

My current plan of attack: 1. Draw and then cut out the outline on the 'bad' side of the log, while deciding what's in the foreground and what is in the background. 2. Start doing the rough work around the leaves, just the big chunks. 3. By the time I get to the end of the bad side, I should have gained some minimal level of proficiency and be ready to start doing some of the more detailed shaping of the leaves. Gonna need some skill to capture the energy.

So here's where I've gotten to this weekend.

Here's the rough outline. So far I'm not too impressed the feeling it conveys but I'm hoping it'll get better. And I gotta remember, this is the bad side. I can boob it up and start over with all my lessons learned 

Close up showing some of the detail of the carving. It's actually hard from the photo to see how deep it is, but isn't the wood grain gorgeous?

So what have I learned this weekend. 1. It's way easier to carve with the grain. Going across the grain seems to tear the wood. I'm not sure if that's just because most of my tools aren't sharp enough. Head scratcher there. I'll investigate further 2. Try to keep the outline nice and clean as you go. It's much harder to clean up a jagged line after you've dug down past the depth of the parting tool. 3. When designing, be careful of the leaf intersections. Make em too fussy with tight spaces and the carving is REALLY HARD. 4. Don't work too long. It all gets harder when you get tired.

That's pretty good learning for one weekend.