Bear's Teeth !

My time on the project today was spent defining and 'extracting' the Bear's teeth. They shouldn't bee too regular, I decided, and the exposed tongue is of equal importance in the mouth.

The Bear is also usually shown holding a fish. And although this wasn't in our prototype, I decided it would be fun to include one. So here you can see the fish outlined and the start of the rather indicative paws holding it.

Approx 3 hours
BTW I use a stopwatch to get some idea of how long I spend on any project like this. Of course sometimes I orget to start it, or forget to turn it off when I get an interruption, but generally the timings are good enough.

Southwick Show

Today I joined with my fellow Guild members to exhibit and demonstrate carving at the Southwick Village Show. The weather was beautiful, sunny and warm with just a gentle breeze to keep things reasonably cool.

I took the Totem pole and here you see it set up ready to start.



Here you can see some of my colleagues and our exhibition.



As always at these events we spend a lot of time talking to the visitors, so only a limited amount of carving actually gets done. However I did manage to rough out the mouth, exposing the tongue, and starting to define the level of the teeth.



Approx 1.5 hours

The Bear's Eyes.

Today I have shaped the Bear's nose and eyes. Had some trouble with interlocked grain through and under the left eye, but providing I approach this from the correct angles the gain can be controlled.Although the eyes have been shaped, rounded and smoothed, I have not given them 'sight'. I adhere to the idea believed by many other carvers, that giving sight to a figurative carving should be the last thing you do, (if it is done at all !)


3.5 hours

Shaping and Starting the Bear

The first task with the Idigbo length was to remove the front corners. As the piece is rectangular rather than square in cross-section I decided to leave the back flat with just a small amount of rounding. I also decided that I could use the whole width near the front to accommodate the Beaver's stick, so marked off that area so as not to remove it.

I cross cut the corners at the marked limits of the Beaver's stick, and then set the band saw a 45 degrees and removed the corners.

I then decided to start carving the Bear, as this is at the bottom of the pole.



This shows the area left for the 'stick', the top corners removed and the beginning of the carving of the Bear's crown.

2 hours

A New Start?

Today I found a length of Idigbo which I decided would satisfy the requirement. It is not quite as long as the original, but I decided that it could be mounted on some sort of plinth, which would lift it off the ground.



Idigbo is a yellowish hardwood from the Idigbo Tree (Terminalia Ivorensis), native to the west coast of Africa. It has a rather interlocked grain. This does mean some difficulties with the direction of cut. The wood contains a dye which may stain other materials when wet; it also contains tannin which causes staining when in contact with iron under moist conditions. We must take this into account when planning the mounting etc.

I have calculated the size and separation of the animals.

1 hour

The Pole at Titchfield

Today I took the pole to Titchfield where I was demonstrating with the Solent Guild at the Fareham Model Engineers open day.

I worked on the beaver for a while but as I started to put in more of the detail it became apparent that because of the dry cracked nature of the surface, it was going to be very difficult to stop it breaking up as I carved it. Other members of the Guild also thought that it was going to be unlikely that a decent finish would be possible.

Also I realized that two faults which I had originally thought to be surface damage, were in fact caused by large embedded nails.

I decided to find an alternative which would be more satisfactory.

2.5 Hours

Starting the Beaver

I decided to start on one of the more complicated animals today. The beaver is very stylized on Totems. They are characterized by their two long front teeth and they are always holding a stick. The children had depicted this in paint but I had to think how to carve it.

I found this picture of a Totem Beaver, and decided to base my work on it.



I blew the picture up to the size needed and then copied the basic shapes freehand onto the surface. This surface will definitely cause problems if I try to put in very much fine detail, so providing the basic shapes are there, the detail may have to be painted.

I started on the eyes and nose because they are the parts that 'fix' other details.
This is as far as I got today:



Approx 1.5 hours

Continuing the Owl

More or less completed shaping the Owl today.

Continued with the rounding, top and bottom, taking it around most of the back.

I decided rather than just painting on the beak, it would be preferable to add a sculpted beak, so I flattened the shape on the front of the pole so that the beak can be fixed on later.

At the end of the day, the Owl looked like this:



Approx 1 hour

Owl Shaping

Having got the pole now installed in my home work area, my conservatory, I had to decide where to start the figure shaping. I had noticed that some of the surface is rather unstable due to weathering and splitting, so decided to start on the simplest shape - the Snowy Owl.

At the school I had showed some of the children how to find the best part of the pole to be the front face, and had marked all down this with a pencil. In fact we had also marked the eyes or the Owl and I had demonstrated how these were hollowed.

Today I continued to take these out and deepened the pupils. I then started rounding the owl's shape, deepening the dividing incisions as the rounding got deeper.

Approx 2 hours.

Second School Visit

For my second visit to the school, I took just the few tools that I thought we would need to complete the initial carving. I set the post up as before and got the children to complete the initial incisions that we had started the week before.

Here is one 'apprentice' hard at work:



I then took individual pictures of parts of the original pole so that I could work on carving them at home.