Channeling Grinling Gibbons.......

At least I am trying to channel him. In case you aren't familiar with his work, he was master carver to King Charles II and George I of England . He is my hero when it comes to woodcarving. His carvings are life sized, but every detail is perfect. I want to be him when I grow up.

Now, about my woodcarving. After looking at that piece, I quit. No. Not really, but sometimes I feel like it.

I started the small fireplace this morning. I traced all three pieces that I am planning to do on wood with the old pencil for carbon paper trick. I'm pretty sure that everyone learned how to do this back in grade school, but just in case you didn't here it is. I simply cut out the piece that I wanted to transfer to the wood and colored the back of it heavily with pencil. I then taped it to the board and traced it to transfer all of the lines. After that I went over all of the lines on the wood once more so that I could see them clearly. It's messy, but someone has to do it.

I then cut them out on the jig saw. Then I sanded the edges. I did the two fireplace surrounds in bass wood and the front door in walnut. I am still thinking of painting the fireplaces to look like stone or marble. I didn't want to waste pretty walnut if I was just going to paint over it.

I didn't have any wood wide enough to do the downstairs fireplace in one piece, so I cut a keystone for the top of the arch. Under that, the two pieces will be butt jointed and I wanted to make it more stable. That's why a lot of real fireplaces have that very same feature. It's not just for cute.

The last photo shows how far I have gotten with an hour of carving......No one ever said that this was a fast process. The carving that you see is just blocked out. It's nowhere near done. The lighter areas are mostly background spots that I have carved down so that the leaves will stand out.

I think that it will help that I have an eye check up tomorrow and should have glasses that I can actually see through in the near future.....It kind of slows one down when they can't see what they are doing. Oops! There goes another finger.....

The tools that you see are what I use. The Exacto is my weapon of choice, followed by an emery board cut into quarters. I angle one end of that to get into small corners. The files get used a bit, but not as much as the other two.

As I said before, no one said this was going to be fast. I guess that I should get back to work if I want to finish carving sometime in this century.

See you tomorrow.