Customers; are an immutable part of doing a boat show as a vendor. They are your livelihood, your joy, and your bane.
Flashback Friday – The Killer Product
First Rate
People starting out in carving sometimes ask me for advice. I think they expect me to come up with some impressive Koan of karmic wisdom—follow the wood, trust in the wood, or thank the wood—but I'm just not that much of a Zen sort of guy.Instead of mystical wisdom, I offer straightforward and practical advice: …
Forgotten Tools
Every craft has a few tools that seem so insignificant and ordinary that we pass over them when discussing how we work.
Easy
wanted to make a small joke birthday present for a friend. I did the lettering on the Epilog laser in about ten minutes. It took more time to resaw and plane the native cherry wood for the sign blank than for the laser to execute the design.
Compact tools for efficiency and cost
Lots of us have small shops either through design or necessity. In my case, I deliberately downsized as I shifted from doing larger maritime work like quarterboards and transoms and started focusing on ship and boat portraits. Whatever reason you have for smaller quarters, I encourage you to rethink the conventional wisdom that large is always best.
Stability
A while ago, I read an article in the New York Times on how artwork produced in the past seventy years was disintegrating rapidly. The deterioration was due to impermanent pigments, aging materials, and chemical conflicts between elements in a mixed media artwork. Some things were never meant to last forever, and others were never intended to be together in art.
Brightwork
What you coat a carving with has distinct practical and esthetic consequences. I tended to make things for boats; quarterboards, billet heads, eagles, or transom banners. I always used carefully applied varnish, paint, and gold leaf.
Progress
The world of woodworking is full of handbooks, videos, manuals, and magazines that aver to show you the best way to do things.
Book Hunts
Since my interests as an anthropologist and as a woodcarver have tended towards the maritime, you'd expect that my library would be heavily weighted to those interests, and you'd be right. However, I used library sales and second-hand booksellers to do this for less than a fortune. I could and should recite a panegyric to praise libraries and their book sales. And if you are interested in arts and crafts, you should also.
Old Head
You only get one clean slate. That's when you are a kid. After that, you can scrub at it, but it'll always be a sort of palimpsest, with bits of the old layers faintly showing from below.
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