Carving.

Carving out a lion's head

Week 2 of carving and Charlie Oldham, the visiting tutor, has imparted some little gems of wisdom which I thought I would share:

1) The best woods to carve are jelutong and lime.

2) Never undercut until the last possible moment.

3) Eyes are a weird one to carve as they look like they are staring at you the entire time. Concentrate on the area around the eyes (the negative spaces), rather than the eye itself.

4) If you've cut away too much on a particular bit by accident, you may still be able to salvage the piece by flattening/lowering the other bits.

5) Perspex is quite helpful in trying to trace out a 3D image.

Finished carvings in various styles

I've finished with the routing experiment and sadly have to report that FEAR is back and doesn't appear to be going away any time soon. All I need to do is pick up a piece for routing before I start sweating profusely. On the plus side, I've finished my clothes horse and my carved mirror. The only question now is whether or not I gild the trees for my mirror?

Yes, that is spring you see in the background

These don't really look like cacti do they?

Hand-carved mirror frame

Up close - am also thinking about adding a sycamore mitre key as a feature (and for added strength)

It gets really busy in the workshop most days and there's always a nice background rattle and hum of work in progress (unless Ben's on the planer in which case it sounds more like a jumbo jet taking off in your back yard). The thing I like the most though is that there are usually several different conversations going off at any one time, and its quite easy to float in and out of any one of them, which is a nice way of breaking up the day. A hot topic of conversation this week has been a much neglected one in recent weeks, namely our Jonathan. We've had a busy week of trying him out in (on?) more furniture to a variety of results.

A piece of Jonathan proportions

Definitely not a Jonathan

You won't quite believe what you can do with a Jonathan until you see it for yourself