Bird and Fish

These past couple weeks have been quite interesting. As much as I have been planning to spend time in the woodshop things keep getting in the way. On monday I had a large reading to get finish, on wednesday we had our schools diversity day which meant that I had no classes and today I went home sick. That hasn't stopped me from drawing though I have done a bunch of drawings over the past 4 or five days and I got a carving finished on Tuesday. Here is a picture of a couple drawings and another of the first sketch on wood of my carving.

A draft of the carving to come

My next carving

This is a picture of the carving I just finished in its early stages. If you look closely you can see my guide sketch and the early carving I have completed. All of the carving you see in the picture has been done by my own knife. It is a very special feeling to make these carvings with you own knife. The rest of the work was done with crooked knifes as well as some final touches with a veiner. In this carving I focused on making it clean without any wood fibers taking away from the smooth carved surface. I will post the finished pictures soon!

Clay and Wood

I've finally started my study of combining wood and clay forms.  For the past couple days I have been looking through books on form line design and creating wood cutouts of classic Coast Art shapes for imprinting in clay. I've only just begun but I have found that bigger shapes are not only more aesthetically pleasing but I then have to opportunity to carve into the clay. Here are a couple preliminary pictures, more to come! This is a bit of a picture overload but mixed in are a couple sketches I did for shapes to cut.

Ready to Cut

I just finished up the knife and I am super happy with it. It has a great handle and the blade ended up working very well. The final steps of the process weren't incredibly difficult they just took time. First I had to drill a hole through the handle for a brass rivet to really set the blade in the handle. I did this with the drill press, using the half of the handle with a hole already cut as my guide. After that I took a piece of 1/8th in. brass rod and drove it through the hole. I then used a ball peen hammer and the anvil we have in the shop to mushroom the brass rod and smooth it into a nail head. Here is a picture of the finished product.

Finishing

The knife is basically finished! Woohoo! It is sitting in the shop right now and has a coat of salad bowl finish on it. I tried out a couple cuts with it and it cuts like butter which is great! The blade is a slight different shape than originally expected but I like it and think it will work out well. Tom tells me there is something supremely satisfying about using a tool you made from scratch and he is right.

The last couple steps took awhile because I wanted to make the blade perfect and the handle really smooth. I spent almost a week of my time in the shop sanding and re-sanding as well as reshaping the blade. Then I drove some brass rivets into the holes I created and spent about 30 minutes smoothing the ends with a ball peen hammer which was quite repetitious and soothing. I'm about to go down to the shop and take some pictures of the final project and now I am working on drawings for my ceramics and woodworking joint project. More posts and pictures to come!