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A recent finished handle in Walnut. I like the very dark kind of silky sheen of this wood. (On knives handles I just apply a little bit of “Holzbutter”, a special product for wood, food-save.)
Very well done and thanks for showing! I also like your explanations on the symbols carved and how you use them to give things a deeper layer. Great work! All around.
… by the way, just guessing … you’ll get a interesting pattern by repeating this kind of “star rectangle” design.
Very well done! Thanks for showing. In my opinion the typeface (Uncial?) goes very well with what “Irish Blessing” kind of associates commonly.
Having Adobe’s Illustrator App on my computer anyway, I design all my patterns in this app. The printout is on a Laserprinter. I glue the paper directly on the wood with a water-soluble gluestick. The grainflow I can always check on the board’s flipside—if I can’t see it on the carving side anyways. After finishing I remove all paper’s and glue stick’s residues with a warm humid towel. Sure the board cups with this treatment. But that’s just until the next day. If all is dry again the board is a flat as before.
Removing residues with humidity is also the reason not to take inkjet printouts! Inkjet ink is water-soluble. It bleeds into the wood.
Hello Chris
In my humble opionion there’s not a lot left to add on David Bass’ very profound essay.
From my point of view concistency is a matter of repeating and training, repeating and training. You don’t learn the letters and numbers the first day at school. No one flatpicks his guitar like Billy Strings from day one. No one hits a target with nothing without training, knowhow, practice.
As an example I cut the same to me difficult letters against the wood’s grain again and again (see foto attached). Like back then in school when we had to learn wrighting those letters. And only last week I had my first practice board finished and with more letters okay than not.
So like David wrote I’m confident too—concistency is obtainable.
Kind regards,
Norbert
Thanks a lot for this postings! That’s very well worked out in my humble opinion! Free form carvings are on my bucket list too. Thanks for this inspiration.
In his book “Das Kerbschnitzen” (1959) Christian Rubi recommends on page 45 to start the cuts from the center outwards—but just for a bit; not the whole line. (See black & white top left figure in my picture.) Personally, after a little bit more than two years in chip carving I’m not skilled enough to finish partial or subcuts properly in more than one step/cut. I always have to cut in one move because otherwise I tend to change the blades angle. And this kind of flaw is very visible along a cut.
My workaround is, not to cut all the way in the center. Because if you draw many lines thru a centerpoint, the lines build up for a “stain” too. Hence I guess it’s more appropriate to leave an evenly shaped but uncut part of wood in the center than broken out parts of cuts. I usually start to cut with the right sided line right in the center carefully and not deeper than required, then I cut the following short outer line. The third cut goes back in the center very, very carefully, especially towards the end of the cut. There it’s crucial not to cut too deep. I always try to imagine where the tip of the blade is in the wood. Occasionally I also draw guide lines for this matter, to help me find out, where the blade’s tip should be (see dotted lines on the board right hand side of the picture).
But I also guess that this problem depends on the type of wood and the quality of the boards you use.
I hope you are able to understand what I wish to describe despite writing very verbosly.
Take care everybody.
I agree a 100 percent! Especially with everything that is clearly a geometrical pattern. Will say, a mix of circles/parts of them with other forms such as squares and rectangles, line-cuts between the raw forms etc. etc. There are myriads of combinations possible. And if you just cut one piece more or less you’ll get a different look. If you compare the pattern such as the lower right in your picture from Rubi’s book with some parts in my last picture posted, yes, it looks the same. Or similar. But different. And yes, you will find this very pattern all over the world in all different cultures where humans cut in wood, horn, stone, even metals.
That’s a nice and interesting mix of styles, well done in my opinion! The shape of the foliated letter reminds me on a picture from instagram. An american chip carver called “saturdayboxco” posted one of his fine works, a “piggy bank”. The artwork was out of Charles Leland’s 1909 Manual of Woodcarving, according to saturdayboxco.
