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.