Carving the Two-Step Stool

Maybe I'm getting bored with the plainness of things I make.  The stool from last week's post needed a little jazzing up, so I searched the internet for images of carvings.  Most of the things I saw were far beyond my ability.  I thought I wanted something with leaves, so I just kind of winged it.

First step was to make a scale drawing of the side panel of the stool.  Then I drew in a stem that branched in a few places to fill the space and placed a series of small leaves along those branches.  I didn't want the leaves to be too intricate - just something that would be easy to carve.

Sketch of what I'm thinking

Did a small sketch on an offcut ...

... and carved that one to test the idea

Pleased enough with that, I started in on the real thing.  After drawing the pattern on the right side panel, I grooved the stems with a 90° V chisel.  The leaves were all cut in with a single 1" wide x 1 3/8" diameter gouge - just a standard gouge, not a gouge specifically for carving.

Drawing the pattern on the right side panel

Stems carved out and starting on the leaves

For the leaves, I didn't want them all the same size, so I tilted the gouge and struck it with a hammer.  The degree to which I struck it determined the depth and length of the leaf. 

Starting a leaf

Note how the chisel mark gets finer as you get farther from the stem

Then with gouge moved back and canted back, pared down to the first cut to remove a chip 

A VERY sharp knife was used to clean up the depths of each leaf

Bought this knife many years ago, and never really liked it - as a marking knife.
But I sharpened it better than ever before and it performed admirably for cleaning
out the corners of this carving.

I only used three tools to do this carving - the V chisel, a gouge, and the knife.  It might have been nice to have more carving tools to make subtle differences in the leaves, but you use what you've got.

The left side panel was easier and came out better than the right because of the learning that came from doing the right panel.  Interesting how much you can figure out just by doing a little of it.  I'm not ready to rival Grinling Gibbons' carvings, but I'm happy with this.

The finished product