Practice Piece

I was cleaning up in the basement the other day and found some buried things that I had forgotten. One was this practice, Bellamy Eagle.

I taught marine carving for about six years. Another teacher had created the course, and I took over when he became ill. I tweaked the curriculum to suit my approaches to carving but kept much of the original course intact. My predecessor liked John Haley Bellamy’s approach to carving eagles, and I retained that even though I do not carve any Bellamy designs. They are, though, appropriate for a beginning carver.

I began each week-long course with workshops in sharpening and essential knife use and control. Once you learn to keep a knife sharp and use it well, all the other tools a carver needs fall into place with practice. We started with chip carving. Students can complete a project in an hour and build skills and confidence.
On day two, we moved on to carving a lettered quarterboard. Letter carving is basically chip carving, and using chip carving skills, we created a quarterboard with incised lettering.
By Wednesday, we were ready to start carving our Bellamy eagle. Here, the students learned to use gouges and carving firmers to create the head and body of the eagle. The school provided bandsawed blanks. The Bellamy Eagle is a challenging project for beginners, but the students had been building skills for several days before starting. They were up to the task.

The schedule left little time for varnishing, painting, or gilding the eagle. That’s where my practice eagle came in handy. It has been used to demonstrate a variety of carving and finishing techniques. Usually, on the last day, we used it as a test dummy for applying 23-carat gold leaf, which is why the finish is uneven. Gold leafing takes practice, and my Bellamy eagle absorbed lots of student practice over some six years of use.

Gilding with 23 caret gold is another skill a carver may need, and like all the others, practice is the only way to acquire it. The most difficult part of the process is learning when to apply the feather lite gold to the sticky size required to adhere the gold leaf to the eagle. Having an experimental surface to work on removes some of the stress.