As I look back at my carving and wood turnings this past year…I started out strong with what has become one of my favourite pieces and then tapered away to smaller carvings for my two little grandchildren! I did spend a lot of enjoyable time putting together smaller projects that I used at our local carving club in Kingston to help people with fun little projects…in particular, a whimsical “boot”, a little wintery wardrobe fellow and several of my Christmas Bell designs.  I also had a terrific opportunity to teach a half day course at Queen’s University to some really advanced art students who ..read more

I really should have mentioned this earlier to everyone, but along with John Paul Andre, a fellow carver and friend who now lives in Nova Scotia, we decided to create a “Zoom-based” caricature carving group a couple of years ago.   Our group started as a means for a few people to continue to meet and chat despite the temporary shutdown of clubs and shows over the recent past and it’s expanded now to include a prepared agenda with topics of conversation led by individual group members, a Youtube channel presenting our full one and a half hour meetings as well as individual fifteen to twen ..read more

It’s great to be back to the tributesinwood blog and I’ll start by saying that I got caught up in having a lot of fun enjoying my family and carving…and didn’t get around to telling you about it! So, you’ll forgive me a bit if I take you back to a few Christmas carvings that I created for the grandchildren. Now, the little ones are really little and have no idea whatsoever as to what I just helped them unwrap and why some of the stuff gets parked on a shelf…but someday they’ll get it. I really enjoyed making a number of Christmas Bell caricature carvings that ended up on my daughter’s and a fe ..read more

First off…to the individual who plagiarized my last post and placed it on his own website…you did a poor job but nonetheless managed to reach a new low. I’ve reported this and will be monitoring the outcome. Now back to it… Once I had the body roughed in, it was time to start adding some detail. I decided on denim overalls cut high on the leg to show off her black and white saddle shoes. Some work with a knife and gouge followed up with some wood burning of clothing lines, stitches and deepening of wrinkles was all that was needed to get into painting. When you’re adding wrinkles, don’t leave ..read more

Now I was at the point that I needed to start making some decisions as to the positioning for the body of the girl rider. I wanted to get as much motion in this carving as possible, so I went with a body position that you would see in a rodeo rider on a bucking bronco! I found some body proportions measurements for a young girl off of the web and put together a copper wire wound skeleton that I could build a clay model around. I soldered the hip and shoulder connections so that it would be nice and strong and allow me to bend things around to my liking without the worry of something breaking o ..read more

I decided to paint the base in a way that it looks like it’s been around for a lot of years and has seen its share of use. The wooden base started off with several thin, wash coats of ‘red barn’ which gives it a nice reddish-brown look. I hand painted the lettering with a fine brush and tried to keep the paint a bit translucent to make it look like the letters were fading. Later, I added small dry-brush scuffs of ‘burnt sienna’ and ‘raw sienna’ to show some dirt and wear everywhere on the box, including over top of the lettering. I mixed up a light beige colour using white, brown and a tiny bi ..read more

As is the case with most of my carvings, my ideas change as I go along. It seems that once I see a portion of the carving, a new idea or, at least, a modification of the original idea comes along that appears to be a better fit for the final project. I’m not sure if that’s a common approach or not but it’s certainly what happens in my brain. With this one, although I started off thinking that a grown woman would be a comical candidate for riding the mechanical horse, I ended up with the idea that a little girl in cowboy dress would be nicer. So, because I had started some time ago on a head an ..read more

When I carved the female head for my last carving of the cowgirl with the fiddle, I had actually carved a second female head at the same time. I didn’t really have a plan for either of the heads, I just wanted to take on the challenge of carving something other than a male caricature. So, that left me with a second female head and I enjoyed doing the cowgirl figure so much, I decided to come up with another little scene…and, what I’m picturing is a grown young woman wanna-be-cowgirl practicing her trick riding on an old store front mechanical riding pony! With that, here’s the start to the sce ..read more

I won’t go into a lot of detail in regard to painting, but I’ll post some photos of the various sections of the carving showing the painting. I use latex acrylic paints that you can buy at any store that sells art related items. I probably have something like thirty or forty small bottles of a variety of colours and spend some amount of time mixing various colours together to get the tone that I’m looking to achieve for a particular part of the carving. In general, I try my best to apply “washes”, or very thin coats of paint. Too thick an application, like directly from the container, would hi ..read more

I used a wood burning tool with a razor sharp tip to add in some detail prior to painting. The burning process is a really good way to get nice crisp lines and boundaries in your painting. As an example, I basically cross-hatched in some very fine squares to represent beading on this gal’s leather vest. Later, you’ll see how this cross-hatching basically made small valleys or boundaries for the painting process. Now just a drop of paint in any one of the tiny squares will flow no further than the boundary that was burned, making a nice crisp final painted pattern. Similarly, a burned line arou ..read more