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...

oops....

went to cut the base flat on the santa, and the saw had other plans...



ripped it right out of my hand and threw it. really no easy way to clamp carvings for cutting after they've been carved, and cutting driftwood before would limit the possibilities of the wood.

it was easily salvaged though, and i think ended up being better for it. i realized while fixing it, that i never got around to mentioning the second reason i cringe at painting my carvings.





the grain.

i love wood grain. infinitely variable and, when present, always interesting. nature is the ultimate artist.

done carving it....



...at least for tonight anyway.



edit: DAMNIT!!! i just saw the other divot in the beard, visible in the photo above. definitely NOT done carving it...

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.

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

sabhailte

julie, who is fully in cahoots with the monkee, posted up some photos from the weekends ride/race and post slog activities over on her blog. click it if you would like to see. i'm featured prominently, as is my thinning hair....

a few posts ago i mentioned what might be my worst carving ever. it was bad enough that i wouldn't even post a photo of it. it basically ended up looking like this guy dressed up as an old wizard for halloween. well, i've finally gotten to attempting to salvage it. the first step in doing so was to break the thing in half over my knee.

here it is in all it's former lack of glory.



i'm really not sure what i was thinking when i made the left arm about half the length of the right one. and i swear there was no beer involved.

i liked the hat, and the face was salvageable enough, to that was a start. the upper half became this:



and the lower half is a raven in progress. just need to do some research on ravens first.



don't hold me to the raven part actually. it'll be a bird, most likely a raven, but that could change i suppose.

i had been scouring the interwebs for a shepherd's hook diamond riffler file, since i hadn't been able to find the one i was using while carving in mexico. it was the most useful file in the bunch for the type of finishing i was doing. i've purchased two different riffler file sets since and none of the shapes included fit everything that the shepherd's hook would. well, i finally located it, along with the rest of the original set, and a handful of very useful gouge shapes. i had it the whole time, it was in the far back corner of the box i never open. of course.

ollpheist adhmad

neck is a wee bit sore today. guess i hit the ground a little harder than i thought yesterday....

might head out for a little spin in a bit, just to stay loose. got some new carvings done.

ceann eile

carving even a soft wood like whatever the piece below is really makes me realize just how heavenly it is to carve cottonwood bark. and you'll likely never catch me trying to carve ironwood again with hand tools like i did in mexico... i remember at one point down there waking up with my fingers locked in a clench.

i intended for this to be a full body, but it just didn't happen.





my legs are really sore from yesterdays hike, and there's a bottom bracket issue with the new bike, so not much in the way of exercise today. excuses excuses...

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.

snoíodóireacht adhmaid

no riding today. it was raining and i, again, lacked the motivation. got an interesting call though, with some interesting info. need to return that call.

worked a little bit on two of the carvings i posted yesterday. well, a lot on one of them and a little on the other. i cleaned up the one and squared up the eyes a 'little' better, and cut the entire face off the other and re-carved it.

still not symmetrical, but who is?





this guy from yesterday's post:




became this guy from today:



this is one i've had sitting around for about a month.



anyone know what type of wood this is? it's about 2 inches in diameter and was found as driftwood on the coast of norton sound.

adhmad aris.

rode today, on the karate monkey. having some flexing issues with the back end. i don't think it enjoyed all that bending and hammering to fit the 26 x 3 and 70mm rims as much as i did. good thing the 'other' is nearing completion. one glitch i've run into with the 'other' is that rock shox has decided to go post mount on their 29" forks this year. at least the 20mm axle one anyway. unfortunately, half of the 20mm hubs on the market are 'out of their spec range'. which means that the hope moto v2 caliper hits the friggen spokes when mounted straight to the posts and slammed all the way left. i have a 183 adapter en route in the hopes that it'll cure my woes. according to a thread on the ultimate waste of a mtbers time, it's happening to nearly everyone stupid enough to purchase that fork. i should have known better than to trust a company starting with the letter 's'. other than surly. and speedway. so, starting with the letter 's' and containing the letter 'm'. the ride was a brief one at crev-mo. it was enjoyable, i played around a bit, and walked the steeper hills because im a disgusting blob.



got home and actually did some carving. i've been doing it sporadically ever since mexico. i guess maybe sparsely would be more accurate. but alot more since i moved up here and discovered cottonwood bark, which carves like butta and is in massive abundance. the typical stuff i've always been doing, santas and woodspirits. santas because my mom likes them and woodspirits because everyone likes them wether they admit it publicly or not. what's not to like about a crazy old man with an epic beard painstakingly carved into a piece of wood?

here's a preview. most will be getting some sort of paint. the cottonwood bark actually needs paint to tone down the excessive grain, which drowns out features of the carvings unless side lit.



this one is today's


blurry