Horse Pyrography Underway – A Small High relief Carving Begun and A Simpler Welsh Lovespoon Design

This pyrography piece is well underway now. It is from a photo I took around this time last year in Petra ( Jordan ).

Once the details have been completed I intend to add a very dark background on most of the right hand side and up from the bottom edge about five eighths of the way. I always find it a bit of a challenge to achieve an even tone in large dark areas with out adding unwanted texture, engraving itself into the timber surface. It is this engraved line effect however that makes pyrography such a suitable medium for the portrayal of animal fur and feathers.

I have returned to using hoop pine again for this piece partly because it is readily available here and it has no open grain that would lead to more than just a little bit of extra work to render those expansive dark areas that I intend to add. Much of the pyrography work that I have done so far has been reliant on the building of tones and textures with short layered strokes with a modified fine writing point and 'brushed' on passages with a shading tip in the larger darker areas. This technique works well enough for fairly realistic renderings and the portrayal of detail in fantasy pictures but I am thinking of using just line, or mostly line, together with water colour or gouache for some pieces more decorative in style and possibly more enduring from an archival point of view.

Most of my pyrography work has been for entry in competitions that I am eager to support as there is generally little participation in wood crafts in my country unfortunately. This leads to doing work that displays as great a range of tonal and line marks on the timber as best represents a thorough going application of the craft being represented rather than what makes a pleasing picture or decorative object.

It has been interesting in this piece attempting to represent the texture in the woven bands around the horse's muzzle without trying to replicate the patterned texture of the woven bands exactly. There are two reasons for not trying to represent the pattern exactly but instead trying for the 'appearance' of detail through a more achievable method. I've used an 'impressionistic' layering of short engraved lines dots and hatchings to arrive at what might, I hope, sort of appear as if it where accurately drawn.

The first reason for not attempting an exact representation is .., I simply couldn't be bothered, even if I had the skill and concentration to do it. The second reason is that the real texture that I am after here is a combination of the mathematically precise pattern of the weaving being bent around the hardware in slow and fast curves and all the while being made up of fibres pulled and abraded according to the 'fuzzy logic' of the passage of time. These contradictory attributes of the "threadbare-precise' or the 'unravelling-intricate' are a fascinating challenge to render convincingly and I'm not sure If I succeeded or not.

Perhaps much of the success of a realistic drawing depends upon having a 'good audience' like a stand-up comedian wishes for. The audience has to allow themselves to be tricked (willingly) into seeing detail that really isn't there, just looks as if it is. A drawing of an intricate subject needs to look as if it is intricate rather than actually being intricate.

The longer strands of hair in the horses mane are going to pose similar problems as it's the forms of, whole locks of hair, that I want to show the modelling of, in the strong light from the left. The locks will need to have their own substantial presence while still appearing to be composed of thousands of individual hairs, some light against dark and some composing the shadowed recesses of the locks, all the while flowing in slow and sinuous curves across the short hair on the forehead and neck.

I am getting this pyrography piece ready for the Sydney, Timber and Working with Wood Show in June and had hoped to include an entry this year in the carving section.

Pierced Relief Carving Of a Small Dragon

The Carving is a high relief pierced carving on a small panel of mahogany. The subject is a dragon again as will be the theme on my next love spoon. It's not that I'm obsessed with dragons as a subject but they just seem to have cropped up in my work lately. I do enjoy doing dragons though, mainly because in drawing them you are left completely free from any discipline like getting proportions, details and aspects of anatomy correct. They just have to look good and you can add any detail you think would look interesting.

I've just finished illustrating a children's book featuring marine animals and although the animals were a bit stylised I still had to take care to get things right more or less. Way back when I was a biological illustrator I worked with the absolute requirement to get these things right. So as much as I enjoy accuracy, fantasy allows the enjoyment of just getting things to look interesting, without the shear hard work of showing the interesting aspects of the real, truthfully.

The dragon that I'm hoping to carve in this small panel is meant to be in a sort of 'sinuous-gothic' style with the curves in the composition continually interrupted by little brakes and pointed intrusions and extrusions.

Line in a sense will be an important aspect of this carving.

I have always enjoyed the line work in the exquisite penmanship displayed by Arthur Rackham's illustrations and they do seem to blend an 'art nouveau' style with a gothic flavour. I also love the shapes that William Heath Robinson produced in his work, shapes enclosed by a careful and deliberate but clever line that insinuates solidity inside the shape it encloses. It is the ragged energy of Arthur Rackham's illustrations that I want bring into this carving however.

The design has been Attached to the Mahogany blank and I have pierced out the openings on the scroll saw. My original intention was to carve a relief that could be viewed from both sides but to have any chance of finishing it by june I decided to carve from just one side. This is going to create its own problems to solve I'm sure. I'm just about as sure I'm just kidding myself I can finish it by June while giving priority to the above pyrography, but I can only try.

The dragon in this carving is represented about 'life-size' hiding in the foliage of a generic sort of bush about a mile from a medieval castle, as late Victorians would have imagined it. You see I don't take my dragons all that seriously.

Having cut out all the openings on the scroll saw and launched into the carving I can see that there will be a lot of re-drawing of what in the final analysis is really a three dimension illustration rendered in or into a single piece of timber. Where exactly every thing is to be located in that third dimension is going to be a puzzle and I'm thinking at this stage that the carving is going to require fine finishing. Achieving a fine finish might be difficult way inside the carving but I might be able to resort to removal and re-attachment of some elements of the work if it doesn't permanently interfere with the integrity of the piece or make it vulnerable to fragility.

Re-attachment of parts or even using separate pieces isn't something I've tried before in a carving as opposed to a model and of course in the carving of a love spoon it would be a total betrayal of the very essence of what a lovespoon is, by breaking the one defining rule apart from actually being a spoon.

Nevertheless this relief carving isn't a lovespoon. If I manage to finish this relief carving well, I can tell that it won't quite be the same to me as the carver, as carving a lovespoon. It would be pleasant and interesting enough work, together with its own daunting difficulties along the way..,

someone will end up with it and I hope they gain pleasure in having it but somehow lovespoon carving is more a work of service, the recipient is more in view, even if they are as yet unknown.

I can't give a logical account of why this may be the case with the carving of lovespoons it just seems that way.

Its only a practical, logistic consideration but having to construct a clamping board to hold this relief carving reminds me of how much I prefer being able to hold the work in my hand most of the time as I work. Tools are used differently in different types of carving I'm also finding that though I use small chisels and gouges extensively in the carving of lovespoons, I am in fact using them as if they were each, a special kind of knife.

There are ways of using knives in miniature carving such as lovespoon carving that can be inherently safe to the other clamping hand, as the natural arcs of hand movements and the breaking imposed by the natural limits of joint movement, keep the cutting edge only where it should be.

Celtic Dragon Lovespoon Design

As a beginning of a number of simpler lovespoon designs I've drawn up a rendering in Photoshop of a spoon that I intend to carve in a very hard yellowish Queensland timber called 'Saffron Heart' I'm going to see how this design looks carved in the hard timber as finely as possible but without the obliteration of the tool marks by finishing with abrasives. So far I have used abrasives extensively in the finishing of lovespoons and I think that this is usually necessary to achieve the look that I prefer. However I would like to have a go at a different Kind of finish if it seems that it will be effective in the end.

So I have a number of projects at various stages and will endeavour to post regular progress on each asa time goes on.

Pyrography on European Beech Ply 'Compliance'

Just finished 'Compliance', a pyrography picture of a harnessed donkey 280mm X 420mm, on european beech veneered ply, with a small amount of white coloured pencil on highlights.

It's the first time I've tried using coloured pencil and that was because of the beech being just a bit darker than the hoop pine which I've always used in the past. I have another pyrography project to do shortly and I think I will go back to the hoop pine, which is not really a pine at all but a soft white timber native to Queensland, Australia and very suitable for pyrography.

For the next pyrography work I will be doing something a little more along the fantasy line as it will need to be done quickly, because I intend completing an 'in the round' carving project I've been preparing a plasticine model for. This may not be possible as I still have some Illustrations to finish for the book I'm currently illustrating.

After all this I hope to concentrate efforts on some new love spoon designs and also an automata project, that for a long time, has been and still is.., on the drawing board.

Dragon Lovespoon Finished

The 'Dragon Lovespoon' has now been completed and many lessons have been learned along the way. I can see why white beech is highly regarded as a carving timber but I have also learned that it would not yield easily to some of my design intentions – and not at all to others. The idea of a darker and perhaps textured passage of carving in contrast to a relatively pale timber for most of the design, has appealed to me since I saw this effect in one of Mike Davies lovespoons. Pyrography was going to be the means I would use to tone and texture the dragon and to pyro-engrave the scales but a little experimentation on some white beech scraps showed that the soft oily/waxy timber would make this impossibly tricky.

The scales where carved onto the dragon, something which the timber did allow – white beech holds detail surprisingly well for such a soft timber – however its waxy nature made plan 'B' for achieving the two toned effect so difficult that the final result was something less than, or at least, something other than, what I had envisioned when I started out. The whole finishing process in fact was made difficult by the nature of the timber.

Along the way I was able to get some inkling of just how well this timber might be finished using the natural attributes of the timber to bring out its inner beauty. The natural oils and waxiness of the timber could enable it to brought to a very good finish without any other finishing products and perhaps just a little wax and rottenstone would be all the finishing necessary. Plan 'B' however and the two toned finish I was after had sent me down a contrary path to working sympathetically with the timber and so I persevered through various iterations of using artist oil tinted danish oil – washing off with turpentine and reapplying, until a final truce was bartered and some lessons about fighting against, rather than working sympathetically with the particular timber used, were learned.

Gilding with 24 carat gold leaf was another lesson attempted, a lesson that might have been easier on a flat surface rather than the concave interior of the spoon's bowl with two included hearts. The tooled finish inside the bowl, mirrored on parts of the large heart at the top of the spoon, added to the surface area that had to be gilded, more than you'd think.

I'd mentioned before that the white beech held detail quite well in spite of being very soft but the kind of deeply layered detail in this design left me thinking as I progressed, that a harder timber like rock maple would have left a finer finish straight from the tools in those hard to reach areas where the angle of attack for the cutting edge must necessarily be a steep 'scraping' cut. In this timber it was impossible to avoid some fuzziness and little tear-outs in these hard to reach areas. Some fine (400 grit) rifflers that I had recently purchased likewise left some fuzzy fibres, not on the surfaces they worked on but on the adjoining arrises. Fortunately this fuzziness was removed, where it could be reached, with narrow strips of abrasive, even at the same grit as the rifflers..?

The final result was not exactly what I had hoped to achieve, as to the two toned effect or to the fineness of finish that I'd desired. Instead the tinted danish oil with the bit of extra colour on the dragon has ended as an antiqued 'grunge' sort effect.

The use of white beech has been part of a quest to find some suitable Australian native timbers just right for love spoon carving and or designs suitable to the timbers used, but this will require the kind of knowledge only experience can supply. I'll be using white beech again as I still have a few pieces but next time I'll design to work with it rather than against the nature of the timber.

Progress on Dragon Lovespoon

All of the main areas of the design have been roughed out now and most of the design decisions have also been made. That is, decisions that relate to the various depths in the three dimensional form of the entire carving, where the many elements appear. The refining of the forms, adding of details and then the long and careful preparation for the final finish should be a series of tasks a little less risky so far as breakage is concerned.

But not less risky concerning the final appearance of the finished carving.

There is considerable work to be done with the detailing of the large heart with an overlapping leaf pattern and some design decisions to be made about the back of the large heart.

All the knot work has now been laid in, back and front and after smoothing their form with needle files and scraping where possible. I will then attempt the bevelling of the top faces of the ribbons that make up the knot work as originally intended. The back of the knots will be plain and flattish just a little concave.

The scales on the dragon are also going to require quite a bit of work to complete and will also require some modification along the dragon's tail as I have ditched the round section tail for a more hard edged rhomboid section with better light catching properties. I had originally thought of using pyrography to engrave the scales on the dragon and to texture and darken the dragon in contrast to the rest of the spoon but this bold step will depend on many contingencies, including the nature of this particular timber and how well it responds to the technique, the simple fact that not all parts of the dragon are easily accessible and lastly whether I can convince myself by experiment and practice on scrap that the pyrography will make the appearance of the carving better and not worse. I have seen some striking examples of pyrographed toning on some spoons carved by Mike Davies and I've wanted to try this myself. Whether this is the spoon to try it on will depend on the results of experimentation on some scrap pieces.

Even the intended bevelled edges on the top face of the knot-work will require some careful trialling before I plunge into it and I think I may have to get a bit more depth on the top of the knot-work first.

Where the bevels interact with over-layed flowers and stems may also prove tricky.

The bowl of the spoon needs just a little refining of its shape on the outer surface but quite a bit needs to be removed from inside the bowl and undercutting the two hearts contained within it.

The spoon is starting to get somewhere but there is still some way to go yet.

Dragon Lovespoon

Progress has been slow and intermittent so far, with the 'Dragon Lovespoon', due to my other current work commitments. With the carving of the 'Dragon Lovespoon' the most immediate goal that I'm looking forward to, is that point in the carving when all the critical design decisions have been made and the safe, albeit tedious, 'haven' of finely finishing the carving, is reached. Of course right after the initial thrill of finishing some small section to that point where the natural beauty of the timber starts to show and a certain pleasing crispness begins to appear in the forms and shapes, then a restless desire to be designing something new will set in again.

Bearing this in mind it is as well that love spoons have a back and front, so a little variety can be introduced by proceeding to some of the finishing process, with needle files at least, (abrasives are best left until your edge tools are reserved for the next project) and then getting back to carving those parts that will still need some intuitive design work to complete them. I find that I need this variety in a long project, but more especially when I don't have other different work to attend to at the same time.

Engineering a little variety into the work is probably a good idea as long as the discipline of designing well and finishing well isn't interfered with by indolently, only attending to pleasant tasks. However I do have some other work on hand at present and the carving work is something interesting and pleasant to look forward to at various set times. Having good and interesting work to do, is certainly a blessing and a gift from God to mankind, but all work has its tedious side plus its pain and however well it finishes up, there's always something more and something better to look for and look forward to.

The general thickness of this carving, in many places, will be greatly reduced as material is removed from the back of the spoon. This is a time when thought needs to be given to keeping strategic strength in vulnerable parts of the spoon to weather the relatively rough handling of some of the more strenuous passages of carving.

The 'unders' and 'overs' of the Celtic knot work have been set in on the top of the spoon and the depth has been determined for many of the elements. The full three dimensional form of the dragon is still being determined however as carving begins on the back of the spoon.

As the stem of the spoon is 'buried', more or less, in the depth of the carving and only short lengths are accessible to cutting at any one time, the desirable fair curve for the spoon's neck, is going to be a challenge to carve. A lot of guessing and estimation, plus constant checking, will be necessary to establish the long slow and largely imaginary curve of this neck as it traces its 'apparent' path to the bowl of the spoon.

One side of the large heart at the top of the spoon has been carved awaiting the relief carving of the leaf pattern over the surface. I am still deciding how the back of this heart will be carved, whether it will be the same as the front or carved in a more concave manner. A great deal of 'on the fly' design will be needed when the main forms on the back of the spoon are established.

Some continuation of the plant and floral elements on the back of the carving are also going to temper the general alacrity that can be expended on the removal of the large quantities of material on the back as some of this material will be needed for those parts of the continued floral elements situated at the upper layers of the back of the spoon.

Carving of the 'Dragon Lovespoon' Commenced

After completion of all the scrollsaw work, from the pattern. I have commenced the actual carving of the design. There is in fact still quite a bit of design work left to be done, because after the initial plan view drawing of the spoon design, and perhaps a few sketched lines on the edge of the timber block, everything else 'inside' the carving, is beyond my visualisation ability and I am forced to proceed intuitively into the rest of the carving work.

When I say 'forced' into an intuitive mode of working, I don't mean to say that this aspect of the work is not an exciting one and also an enjoyable one, as possibilities suggest themselves for inclusion in the design at many points, in a way enhancing to the work. Things that I might never have thought of with pencil and paper alone. Things for which I can take no credit, just recognise and accept what has been provided.

There are perplexing points as well, as sometimes no clear way ahead appears and mishaps and obstacles pop up instead. All this is part of the story that goes into the carving of a lovespoon however, and whether it is to be known or not, it's good to think that this hidden narrative will somehow add to the enjoyment the recipient will acquire through receipt of this kind of gift.

Perhaps they will be moved, by an albeit, hardly articulate sense, of what has gone into the whole carving, designing and making process. Moved to something like gratitude, not so much to the designer/carver as for the carver, to the maker of that carver – and also maker of the material used – and also maker of their very selves. Selves that have been given their own skills, abilities, even perplexities of life, in which they are sustained in their being.

It must have been easier in a less technological age, even more perhaps in a less industrial age when the human hand was more evident in just about every household artefact, to be confronted with the connection of human lives that had participated in the things we use and have. Many zeros and ones, company profits, corporate identities and shareholders stand between us and this connection now.

You don't have to own a hand-crafted object (most artist/craftspersons would like you to consider it), but have a look around at that part of creation that consists of things made lovingly by human hand, learn an art or craft yourself if you feel inclined, but consider the creator behind every creation and its human connection. And consider that, that creator connected with humanity by becoming human. Lived, suffered and died guiltless and rose again in eternal supremacy. And consider at last that connection with him which is by his invitation, a connection, when you receive it, for which you can take no credit but just recognise and accept what has been provided.

In consideration now of this particular carving, for better or worse, I'm finding the relative softness of the timber requires careful cutting with very sharp tools. But still, the fiddly cutting in close quarters, that I'm having to do in some areas, is resulting in whispy residues of that cutting and tiny tear-outs that will all have to be removed with careful fine sanding at a later stage, probably lots of fine sanding and somehow that needs doing without removing the crisp edges that will need to persist to the finish.

Normally I would use the penciled-in profile of the spoon, on the edge of the block, (temporarily re-assembled after scrollsawing the pattern) as a guide to removing a substantial portion of the waste with the bandsaw however in this case because the design is so dense and layered throughout most of its length, it's not possible to do this with much certainty of not removing too much. So I'm relying on the timber's softness to allow a gradual removal of waste 'on the fly' at those times during the carving process when I actually know what I'm doing.

Dragon Lovespoon

The Outline of the spoon has been cut and the side offcuts kept for the re-assembly of the block prior to cutting the profile. As with my previous spoon, the design, as seen from the top, will lay on many different levels not yet determined, consequently not much can be removed from the profile without diminishing design options.

I have left the inside cuts un-cut as yet and have proceeded to carve out the chain link and swivel, just in case the swivel was not possible to free. I had to use my hand-made bent (heavily bent) chisels, made from piano wire, to get access to the area deep in the cleft of the large heart.

White beech is the softest timber I have carved so far and I'm finding that this softness presents its own problems. To begin with it is much 'easier' to carve, requiring less strength but even greater care is necessary because; cuts can go deeper, a slip can leave a damaging gash, non cutting parts of tools can leave dents, files have to be used carefully and without undue pressure or they will compress and burnish the timber surface rather than cutting and a little more 'on-the-fly' planning has to employed in general as you carve.

I am more used to the quiet violence of imposing form on the valiant resistance of hard timbers than the easy surrender to every errant cut that the softer wood continually threatens. I'm sure this experience will be valuable but I'm also hoping that the entire design will hold up in this timber.

At the bottom of the right hand corner of the design is a knot that I had hoped did not go all the way through or at least became solid toward the centre of the timber block.

Unfortunately it does go all the way in a raggedly open form and so this portion will have to be removed changing the design.The change will only be minimal however, just a small part of the smoke cloud from the dragon's breath.

The next task will be to cut the inside cuts on the scroll saw. Then I can proceed to carve and re-draw, carve and re-draw again and again until each element reaches its level in the multi-layered design.