• A relief in direct carving method

    sculpture

    The holidays are over and so I started a next project last Wednesday: a relief in direct carving method. It's still far from finished, but it's starting to show just a bit by now. I'm carving it out of 'beats-me-stone ', a piece that I had lying around and of which I have no idea what exactly it is. It seems like a layered kind of sandstone, but it can also be a slate-like one. Anyway, it turned out te be a beautiful piece to work in, It can be sanded to a very fine grit and carves away very easily. Sometimes you just need a little luck.

    relief profile
    precarving with a narrow chisel
    relief profile (3)
    halfway rough shaping
    relief profile (2)
    nearly all the details have now been defined

    Update:

    I've been wondering over the last few days what kind stone it should be. For a while, a colleague thought about Ölandsteen from Sweden, but by now, I found out that it should be a German sandstone in any case. But which one? Maybe Sander sandstone?

    The point is that there are so very many German sandstones about, and I have no idea how I should recognize them.

    I would very much like to carve more in this stone. At first I had some trouble with sanding it, because a small test with a rasp made it soon disappear and this also applied to other abrasives. I have been sanding with all kinds of materials, from sandpaper to small pieces of ceramic bonded abrasive disc. Until it turned out that it just goes perfectly with a shard of the same stone! The two stones wear each other off beautifully smooth.

    Now it is known that sandstone is generally best sanded with the same material, but I simply hadn't noticed there was so much sand in this stone. It's a very dense stone, you see.

    And sanding with a stone has another advantage: It's much easier to keep the shapes and forms smooth. A sandpaper follows all lumps and dimples, but a hard shape, such as a file or an abrasive irons these out. Now I can only hope I can find more of that stone.

    Read more…

  • The challenge of the direct carving method

    background
    Tim cut into waist direct a header in French limestone

    Last week my nephew Tim stopped by for a few days to sculpt a head in a piece of French limestone in direct carving method. In this picture he is far from done yet; eventually it became (and especially for a first attempt) a very nice female head, with a pleasant atmosphere to it. Along the way, all the pleasures and challenges of direct carving method came by.

    The most important thing that you find when carving directly is that it requires a lot of concentration and thus, energy , but also that you will learn an enormous amount by doing it this way. It is an intensive process. Carving a head is not easy: what makes a mouth, an eye, a nose, and how do these relate to each other, what are the mutual angles of the cheeks, the forehead, the chin, etc. etc. And if you change anything somewhere, that affects all other parts. Sometimes you'll notice that you're heading in the right direction, but then you'll discover that somewhere else you need to do a lot again, and sometimes you'll discover that it hasn't improved at all. And by that slow process of carving, looking and carving Tim has come from a relatively flat beginning to eventually a nice 3-dimensional head. Chapeau Tim, a good start!

No more messages to show.

No more messages to show.