Shadow

A Flashback Friday presentation from 2020

Whatever I did, something was wrong with the grapevine I was carving. My mentor Warburton took one look and snickered. I decided that as a sign that it was terrible, quite terrible.
He suggested I knock off for the day and return to it tomorrow. “But before you go, stack and sticker this maple.” That’s what life was like with my off-and-on mentor. Rather than just telling me what was going on, he’d let me think on it until there was an “Ahaaa” moment. No such moment came for the vine leaf. Later that week, I contemplated chucking it. “Don’t do that. Not until you have an idea of what went wrong. You’ll repeat the mistake.”
Warburton took pity on me. He grabbed the carving and walked to his workbench. He shifted the carving around in the light. “See how the shadow cast by the sun changes the carving’s appearance. Look for where your work is out of balance. You’ve spent so much time working under light from one source and angle that you can’t see the error in your carving. Use the shadows. Think also in terms of the light where it will be displayed.”
I found the spot that needed fixing and cut away a too-heavy bit of vine. It was now balanced.
Thinking back, it sounds like something from Jedi Training Camp: “Use the Shadow.” But it works.