A Note About Carving

I've never considered myself an artistic type.  Being a total left-brainer (logical, analytical, orderly), that side of things has always escaped me.  It doesn't mean I don't appreciate art; quite the contrary, I love beautiful things and respect the people that conceive and make them.

Embellishing a project with carving just doesn't normally enter my mind when I make something.  But I've done a few carvings and it always feels really good to see it when it's complete.  On the recent Roubo phone stand, I added a simple flower to the upright portion.

Pre-finish phone stand

I've told myself often in the past several years that if I can lay something out right, I can cut to those layout lines.  This carving was no different.  But I can't ignore the importance of keeping one's mind on grain direction.  With many types of joinery, grain direction is not so critical.  With carving, it is.

The layout was done by finding a center and running vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines through that center.  Three circles were drawn with a compass.  The smallest outlines the center of the flower, the next outlines the extent of the petals and the largest shows the extent of the overall carving.

The layout, shown next to a practice run

Tops of the petals were drawn with a circle template,
then the sides of the petals were marked in with my largest gouge

Petal tops and center circle outlined with a smaller gouge

I ended up using 5 gouges.  The two large ones are standard gouges - not specifically carving gouges.  The smaller three are from the set that once belonged to Orvil Heft.  I don't use them often, but I do love using them.

Five gouges - the fishtail on the left was barely used

Most of the background was removed with the two small gouges at the bottom of the photo.  It was two-to-three hours of work for me - I'm sure others could do this in a half hour.  I was being careful not to make any blunders because I'd already put a lot of work into the phone stand.

Just needs a tiny bit more clean-up

I found this pattern on the internet - might have been a picture from Mary May's site.  It's interesting in that each petal seems to go underneath the next petal clockwise.  It gives a nice 3-D effect.

The moral of the story is this: if you can draw (or copy) a shape and can lay out a few lines, you can carve the figure.  And if you don't have a giant set of carving chisels with every curvature and every width, use what you've got.