Welcome to Memo and Alex, new Grapes and Leaves Grads.
Welcome to Arielle and Daniel
Rise finished this piece a bit ago as a gift for her sister. The carving has been gifted and we can share it now. The low relief horse head is carved from a beautiful piece of ripple grain basswood.
Owen finished his basswood Greenman face. The piece of wood was 4" thick, allowing for the beautiful deep relief of the overlapping leaves.
Art, part of our regular Thursday morning gang, finished this great piece This friendly elephant ives on the wall in his garage to keep his reusable grocery bags ready for the next grocery trip. This piece is basswood painted with acrylic paint.
Daniel, after finishing his Grapes and Leaves, carved this snake wrapped walking stick. It is carved from Jelutong and the snake scales are punched with a large 1/2" metal letter "D" stamp. It makes a great scaly snake skin texture.
Bradley finished this Intarsia Unicorn made from basswood and redwood with wood burned and carved details.
The San Francisco class through the Randall Museum is over half way done. The kids class finished their first project and are now all working away at diverse second projects. We have magic wand, soccer ball, relief carved tree, opticall illusion relief and and abstract being worked on.
The Randall adult class finished their Grapes and Leaves and are well into their second projects.
The next generation of woodcarvers hard at work. Echo designed, carved, woodburned and painted this wonderful low relief carving of Persephone for her little sister, Persephone's birthday. Conor is learning an advanced carving technique for his carved prehistoric fish. He did a lovely small texture and woodburned the eyes for his tiny critter ( the name of which I can't even pronounce let alone remember.)
Welcome to Randall and Maize. What a wonderful way for a father and daughter to spend a Saturday afternoon.
More of the younger generation of carvers, hard at work. Maisie is using the elbow clamp technique for sanding the outside of her Alaska Yellow cedar bowl. Bella is wrapped up with riffling her Jelutong Cat sculpture.
I had a couple of interesting commissions in the last few months. This one although small was very difficult. It involved wood burning a customer requested Quote and specific font on the lid of a treasured wooden burl box. The whole lid was only 1 1/2" by 3 1/2". It was very, very challenging.
The second piece, also lettering, was an inscription carved on the back of a teak bench. Lots of things made this one hard. It was a birthday present with a time deadline, there was a shipping company hold up and numerous problems just getting the piece to me, then rush carving, and rush pick up but in the end it all came together. When the customer picked it up they told me the story of "Multa Amoris." The bench was for their mother's birthday. The saying was what their father signed on all of his letters. The father had recently died so it was somewhat of a memorial. I was so glad that it worked out well in the end.
Another commission that I just finished was this stand for this lovely vintage mannequin head. Following are some pictures of the process.
Step one was to work with the client to come up with a design. This was done with a small clay maquette (the model shows up in a later picture.) The next step is to find wood that will work. Here is some of the Jelutong that I got from the pattern maker shop last year.
The base of the head needed to seat closely to the top of the stand. There is a 5/8" steel rod that comes out of the bottom of the head. I used a hand plane to get the fit as close as possible.
Time to glue the two pieces of wood together. Since they were both oversized I only needed to have a good fairly tight joint, the position only needed to be "sorta" close. I used inner tube stretched over the top to apply even pressure.
When the glue was dry it was outside to remove massive amounts of wood with the angle grinder and a very coarse 4 1/2 " Kutzall dish wheel. It made Lots of dust and was difficult to control but I did it. The finer details and smoothing were done with my Balinese tools and Italian riflers.
The roughed out piece sat next to the maquette where I could look at it for several days. I sent off pictures to the client and we both agreed that it was too tall. So back to the shop to cut 2 1/2" off the bottom and do some other small adjustments. Then the final filling and sanding and prepping for the client to have it painted.