corr le cheile

i sat down outside this morning with a strong cup of coffee, actually, it was a coffee mug filled with espresso and brown sugar...., and got to work fixing that pesky divot. that turned into extending the beard to get rid of those little checks in the wood that i didn't want to end up in the face twenty years from now. kim thinks the wood is likely black spruce, which makes sense. so, here it is, again, and again i'm gonna say, i'm done with the carving part of it.





then it was time to get back to the brush work, which is going a little better now. i'm learning just how wet the brush needs to be. it's sort of a fine line between plastering and washing. of the four in the photo below: the 'white' one has had it's base washes, and will be painted in due time. the monster got some more detail but still has a way to go. the devil is nearly done. i just need to 'age' the teeth and get those horns going. the santa on your right is inches from the finish line. needs a bit of flesh in a spot that needed a bit more carving, and some touch up before getting poly'd.



pricing will be fun trying to figure out. i've come a long way from the stuff i was churning out in mexico, but i'm not going to be able to charge what the long time pros do. my skill isn't anywhere close to someone like Maggard or Embrey yet. i think, at first, they'll be close to my prices from mexico...

ag bogail

at some point this weekend, i will begin putting all of my carvings and artwork on another blog: http://carvingsbygrady.blogspot.com/ future carving/artwork updates will go there, as well as information about how to purchase any of them, if anyone is so inclined.

i've been dreading the painting of my carvings for some time now for several reasons. for starters, i really don't have alot of practice painting with a brush. all of the paintings here were done with a combination of sticks, scrapers, paint markers and my fingers. that kinda crap just wont cut it on wood carvings of the size and ilk that i am currently churning out. painting with brushes will take some getting used to, and for now, it's tedious and taking waaaay longer than it should to achieve a given result. practice, practice, practice.....

i began painting a couple of the monsters today in light acrylic washes. neither are finished, but the devil is close. layer after layer of color after color. the horns won't be painted, but will have that sweet polycrylic finish to bring out the grain. oh, and apparently "primary red" is basically pink. took me for friggen ever to mix those colors into something resembling what i think of as red. note to self: next time buy cadmium red...





while i was waiting for layers to dry, i went out for a quick spin on the SSSTUMP. tried going to crev-mo, but there was a high school invitational xc meet, so i decided against risking collision and headed out for a steady effort on the palmer-wasilla highway bike path. fall colors are coming out fast. the reds have been here for a while, and the yellows are coming on strong. wont be long now.



got home to find a package from juxtapoz containing my new t-shirt by jason maloney. i subscribed a couple of weeks ago. it's a magazine i've missed sorely up here.



so i wore it while i painted some more, and when i got sick of painting, and indecisive on colors, i went back to work on a piece of driftwood spruce that i've been chopping away at little by little. i think it's spruce anyway, kind of hard to tell sometimes with driftwood. it's slow going because it's a pain to work with palm chisels. tempermental and tight grained to say the least. the below carving as well, is not yet finished. needs a little more filing and sanding, and i've yet to decide wether to polycrylic it or oil it. i'll also cut the bottom flat so that i can mount it on a wooden base.



i'm probably going to head out for another attempt at crev-mo after an early dinner, then maybe try to get to work on them again afterwords.

aistriu.

got out for a shakedown spin on the Semi-Squishy-Shifty-Therefor-Unmanly-Pony, or SSSTUMP for short. it's got a single ring up front and 5 speeds out back, of which only four seem to work, so it's not really a full on multispeed. i like to think of it as a singlespeed that stutters. besides, the easiest gear it has is a 32 x 24... i need to lower the front end. shorten the travel to 100mm probably and maybe throw on a lower rise/longer stem.

as expected, it's significantly faster over the roots and downhill, and more forgiving of error on obstacles with bumpy exits. climbing was noticeably slower, which i'm attributing to the front end being so high. i also need to actually try adjusting the fork. i kinda just took it out of the box and put it on the bike, like one would with a rigid fork, not adjusting anything. i have no idea what the +/- air pressures are. the maxle is incredible though. 40mm more travel than the reba i was running a couple of years ago on the rigorilla, yet it tracks really damned well through the turns. i like it. gordo rims aren't that noticeably heavy, at least compared with halo freedom disc and wtb ddfr's, which i'm running otherwise. stouts at 50psi had more traction everywhere i rode yesterday than they do at 30-40 psi, and roll alot faster. i did notice more bounce out back on the roots though. even i can admit that 50 psi is a wee bit high for a 29er, especially with 35mm wide rims....



sat down and knocked out a couple of carvings today. first female face i've carved in a looong time....

pre-polycrylic in the backyard sun





post-polycrylic in the behind the garage shade

cosuil le fliuch....

polycrylic is awesome. especially on cottonwood bark. really brings out the colors, darkens it up just enough while maintaining the visual depth of the carving....

for size reference the slats on that picnic table are @3.5" wide.

an diabhal

honestly, if all i ever did was carve santas and wood spirits and other palatable whatevers, i would probably puke and seek out an office job. a monster, demon or devil here and there keeps it interesting for me, and hey, halloween/samhain/dia de los muertos is right around the corner anyway. two today, learned a valuable lesson about trying to carve too much detail in cottonwood bark. that valuable lesson being to not do it. the sharp pointy teeth on demon # 2 below were a royal pain in the ass and probably took much longer than they'll prove worth. in a larger piece of bark, and with increased carving dimensions, it would be fine. but this stuff is somewhere in between basswood and balsa in consistancy and really doesn't like 'fine' detail.

# 1



# 2

ag obair mo mhear ar an cnamh

lot's of carving today.

codladh samh

le suil amhain oscailte

agus glan anois

cleaned em up and added a few features last night after that last post.

it's raining now and amazingly, i have the motivation to ride. i'm gonna go play around at crev mo i think.


edit: ok, now it's raining harder. think i might be losing that motivation.....





and another made today.



riding will commence tomorrow....

an beatha simpli.

eat, relax, waste time on the internet, carve, eat, drink, carve. only thing missing is riding. i got notivation.

not yet finished.