I am being careful and trying hard not to distract myself from the important stuff. I have hit a nice pace. I am creating product and producing it at a rate I can sustain. I know that the warm weather helps. I’m in the shop – door open- dog wandering in to check on the status of any possible treats, and wondering why I am so fixedly gazing at the plank – it’s not food.
Well, it’s a sort of creative food – Feeling optimistic about the creative juices flowing. I’ve found that creativity begets creativity, so keeping in the flow helps. You don’t want to get stopped, distracted, or pulled in too many directions.
Yes, I know that it’s five in the evening, and you and the cat need to be fed…OK.
You can’t create on an empty stomach…say the cat and dog.
CAUTION: this post contains a photo of a shop with actual sawdust, woodchips, and shavings. It does not have a router table or a table saw. This extreme realism may trigger subscribers to woodworking magazines!
One of the reasons I love summer is being able to work in the shop with the door open to the warmth. If you’ve read my blog for a while, you’ll know that the shop is an 8X10 foot greenhouse. But a picture like this demonstrates exactly how small a space this is. And how cramped it is for all the tools I regularly use.
I have multiple projects running, and the chips and shavings cover the floor. I’ll shop vac the mess up sometime in the next day or two. You are not likely to see a shot like this in a magazine…yup…this is it – real woodcarving!
Although the steam yacht Zaida sits within the frame on the wall, it is not quite complete. More steel wool rubbing is needed on the oil-varnish finish, and the sails’ detailing needs recutting where final sanding is removed it. I also may gold leaf the filigree at the bow. But I needed a break from work and wanted to see how it looked hung the wall.
This is my second run at the Steam Yacht Zaida. I’ve used different techniques and am more satisfied with the outcome. To be clear, I do not do scale models. This is neither flat art nor scale modeling. It’s very much in line with the 19th century Dioramas that sailors made of the vessels they served on.
Zaida was built in 1910 at the J.S. White yard In Cowes, England. I’ve shown her here as she appears in the builders drawing. The drawing suggested a seriously overrigged arrangement which included a square yard forward and the possibility of a large staysail amidships. I doubt she ever flew that much canvas since she is described as a twin-screw auxiliary schooner. For this portrait, I’ve reduced the sail plan to something more modest for the deck division to handle. However, at 149 feet in length, she must have had a relatively large crew.
In 1916 Zaida became an auxiliary Patrol vessel in the Royal Navy, armed with six-pound guns. Unfortunately, she was sunk while on patrol near Alexandria that August.
What’s involved in making one of these portraits? First, research, then selective compression of what you will include, and then carving. Research may be as easy as using a builders illustration to figure out the lines for a small sailboat like a small sloop or catboat. But on a larger vessel, especially an older one, research may never yield the sort of completion you wish. For every ship for which a plan exists in a research library or online database, thousands exist only in grainy photos and magazine articles. Sometimes these are the most interesting.
background being leveledThe carving with some of the research materialcarving mostly completefinal stages
After research, you must create a plan for the hull, sail, stacks, and other parts. Sometimes commercial parts exist, but other times it all must be fabricated. Then you can start carving, and in many ways, that is the easy part. The total number of hours? For Zaida, about five hours of research, five of design, and fourteen for carving. Finishing is about four hours. So Zaida required about twenty-eight to thirty hours total. Of course, all this varies depending upon the size, research required, and amount of carving and finishing.
A small sloop is relatively quick to do. And small sloops, catboats, and schooners make up most of the portraits. Something like Zaida is for stretching your skills.
Diversity of products can be the game’s name when you are seeking to keep the volume of sales up as a woodcarver. A wide variety of products has always seemed to work for me.
The little laser engraved sign didn’t cost much for me to make or sell, but it caught customers’ eyes at a show. Of course, you could say that I filched the idea from the sign that leads this post, but from what I’ve heard, the idea has been around for a long time.
Another small piece that drew attention was this small carved breadboard. It is just the right size for a nice boule. The bread may have been made from a humble cereal, but resting on this distinctive board, it becomes something special. I often make my breadboards from maple, but this one has a large amount of flair thanks to the graining pattern of the ash from which I carved it.
I don’t find it fun to do just one thing, and I like to mix it up. A practical concern is that while you wait to attract lucrative commissions, you still have to pay bills. So the little stuff matters; it provides the cash flow that keeps the lights on in the shop.
I found the wood sitting in the shorts at my favorite hardwood dealer. It was very dark, heavy, and dense. It was mahogany but so dark and heavy that I felt it was a wayward piece of Dominican, not Honduran. It was just what I wanted. I wanted to create a banner with a distinctive font, Barnhard Modern. I also wanted to give the banner a center and ends that undulate. The result was pleasing. At shows, people run their hands over the banner as a sensual experience, precisely what I wanted.
How do you do this? You must carve banner ends to appear delicate when viewed from a distance. But up close, there needs to be enough heft that they’ll stand up to the abuse they’ll get on a boat’s transom. For a show display, you have to compromise. People are way closer to the carving than they would be in another boat.
Many banners have curvature, but in most, the area which is lettered is flat. On MANDALAY, the field of the lettering undulates. So, the lettering does not stay in the same plane while laying it out or carving it. To experiment with this, I advise using wood no less than 8/4 in thickness. Any less will be too thin for the effect to work.
First, I carved the banner with all its curves and undulations. It’s essential to control your pleasure in removing wood. Easy. Remember that the effect comes from the smoothness of the curves and contours. Abrupt changes will ruin the look. Periodically take a break to place it in natural light. Turn it upside down and see if the movement of the wood flows. For lettering, you have several options: Old School layout by hand; or New School computer layout in vinyl or paper. I chose a compromise between hand layout and computer layout on paper. The key to the paper template here is that the paper is flat, and the surface is not – hence the title: Paper & Scissors because cutting the paper will allow you to follow the undulating surface. To follow the undulations, you slice the areas between the letters to get them to lay in the correct planes. As you layout, you also need to adjust the kerning ( distance between the letters). When completed, take the design into natural light, turn it upside down, and check to see if it still looks proportionate and balanced. I left this for a day and returned to it fresh the next morning; rested eyes see mistakes. I also find that taking photos on my phone reveals things my eyes sometimes miss.
After the layout was complete, the letter carving was like any other letter carving project. The finish is about eleven coats of Captain’s Z-Spar rubbed out after the first three priming coats and each succeeding one. The lettering I painted with One-Shot yellow sign paint. Two thin coats are better than a single thick covering.
Although gold leafing is an entirely separate topic, I advise that you do yourself an enormous favor and allow the varnish to cure before gold leafing. Remember that’s cure, not dry. Varnish manufacturers will tell you that varnish dries in twenty-four hours. But that is not the same as curing.
Gold leaf has a nasty tendency to stick to anything. But especially uncured varnish. I frequently allow a week or more for the varnish to cure; move on to another project, and come back later to apply gold leaf.
Every craft has a few tools that seem so insignificant and ordinary that we pass over them when discussing how we work. Three that I can’t do without are a simple glove with the fingers cut off, my mallets – a large lignum Vitae one for heavy work, and a little palm job for the delicate touch – the final on this short list is a palm pad filled with a shock-absorbing jell. These are indispensable next to sharp tools, yet they barely receive a mention in handbooks on carving.
carver’s gloveshock absorbant padmallets
The glove keeps your hand from getting abraded while removing the bulk of the background in a carving – sometimes called wasting the background. Remove a significant amount of wood manually without this, and the most minor damage you’ll have are abrasions and scratches from the wood. Splinters are, of course, an issue that the glove helps you avoid. The shock pad will protect the palm of your hand from injury caused by regularly propelling the tool into the wood. Depending on how sensitive your hands are, you could be talking about carpal tunnel syndrome, tendonitis, or merely a sore hand. Whenever you remove a significant amount of wood, using a mallet is a great idea. Carvers mallets are rounded and come in a wide variety of sizes, weights, and wood species. I have about five, but my favorite is the little palm mallet made from a piece of firewood elm. It fits my hand perfectly and is light enough to allow a bit of finesse in hitting the tool.
If you carve and don’t have these tools, you should acquire them – they are cheap and make your carving safer and easier.
This is an original Black and Decker Workmate from the 1980’s. For a while in the ’80’s it was my only carving bench. Then in the ’90’s it went to shows where I was doing demonstrations. Currently it lives outside the carving shop as a solid platform for working on projects that produce prodigious amounts of wood waste, like bowls.
From the paint and varnish you can see that I also use it for finishing. In all those years the only thing that has broken is one of the plastic handles. Today, I got around to replacing part of the bench top. It finally rotted away. Later this summer I’ll make a new one for the opposite side.
I doubt that any of the later iterations of this work surface could take as much abuse as this has and still be working. And remember it sits outside through New England winters.
The plastic hold down on the rear surface is a recent add on from Lee Valley – they are still making add ons that fits this bench.
If you find one of these at a flea market or yard sale give it a good look. It was made solidly in the USA when * Black and Decker was a top tool maker. I expect mine to keep going for many more years.
*As an aside I add that many later imitations were made of the original but did not have the sturdy steel construction.
I consider rebates to be a kind of iniquity. I must send in the information electronically or by mail, wait until it is verified, and wait until the rebate is redeemed. Frequently this takes so long that I am left trying to figure out where the check for $1.98 came from. In the meantime, my name and address were sold to a thousand companies. These companies now send me catalogs and email deals too good to pass up. So now, when a salesperson suggests a rebate is available, I merely beam at them and ask, rhetorically, why not just offer a lower price? I assume psychological and economic theory support higher prices followed by a “generous” rebate as a sales tactic, “look at all you’ll get back!”
But wait! There is still more to this rant!
I try to research my purchases for quality, price, and reputation. I prefer to pay a bit more for a good piece of merchandise rather than have a retailer try to sucker me with a “deal” that isn’t a deal. A proper deal is a fair price for a good product. Not an attempt to sucker me in with some cheap psychological trick. In addition to the rebate, there is the % off coupon. Sometimes these are good deals. If the quality of the item is good, and you need the product anyway. But I’ve grown tired of some tool vendors’ endless email offers for discounts. I wonder if they can offer the product at such a significant discount so often if it is overpriced to start. That line of thinking starts me wondering if they cut quality to offer cheap pricing.
I’ll admit that I developed this position when I began my woodcarving business. Comparing vendors, tools, prices, and quality received becomes second nature when you have a genuine need to own tools that do the job and offer a good return on investment. As a result, I own tools that have been in service for many decades.
The old advice of Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware, has never been more true. However, part of the problem is that we all continue to fall for sales tactics that were probably old in Roman times. I am waiting for the discovery at Pompeii of the wall graffiti advertising Gaius Tiberious’ used chariots – Deals, Deals, Deals!!!!!
The popular press and media like to paint humancreativity as extraordinary “aha!’ sort of moments. And I guess that some creative insights do fall into that category. But you know that scene in the movie when the light bulb goes on, the music swells, and the artist flies into a creative fit of furtive …well…creation.
I prefer to agree with Edison, “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.” Great things rarely come to us in a celestial lightning show. Instead, it’s a matter of research, careful consideration, lots of playing around to get it right, going back to the drawing board to try again, and finally, you’ve got it. Then, working from what you’ve established, you can create many things from your foundation, make it look easy, and convince the noobs that you are a creative miracle in motion.
Books, magazines, courses, TED lectures, and philosophies promise to show you the path to creativity. “Through furtive physic maneuvers, Swami will tauten you chakras and endow you with the very talents of the demiurge.” Of course, your credit card will be required to enhance the flow. I’ve found a day at the beach, a boatyard, or visiting a museum to be stimulating. However, doing focus and relaxation exercises never worked for me. Sometimes play is beneficial. As in play with your art. Give up on the inner censor who complains bitterly about the waste of materials that you’ve ruined. Expending some pigment, paper, pine, or clay is sometimes the cost of creativity. This is why I save odd bits of wood. So I can guiltlessly experiment on scrap. The downside of this is when the experiment is too good, the materials limiting, and you now wish you’d planned better. That is precisely what happened with the boat portrait below.
I experimented with some techniques on a scrap piece of cherry and some pine. The experiment turned out well, but I’d never planned the overall composition – because it wouldn’t be an actual finished piece. It was, after all, an experiment. The techniques worked, but there was no composition, and I didn’t have enough negative space for framing the work after I decided it was lovely. So, I learned more from this piece than I expected to. I display this piece in my living room. Whenever I look at it, I like it for the techniques I learned and get frustrated at my failure to plan. Why keep something so ambivalent around? I like it more than it frustrates me, I guess, and it reminds me of how the creative process works, not all in one burst, but in a series of insights you build on.
In the 90s, the government was busily downsizing, my Department of the Interior program was eliminated; My position became reinvented out of existence.
Things were terrible for the first two years following that. I was in my mid-forties, and professional positions for an anthropologist were scarce.
I created my woodcarving business more from a need to preserve my mental well-being than a genuine impulse to be an entrepreneur. With cash scarce, I resorted to hunting out free or modestly priced wood to carve. Local lumberyards grew accustomed to my visits.
One day I happened upon an operation that milled hardwoods for flooring. Their business was thriving, the quality of their wood excellent. At first, I gratefully scavenged for free wood from their dumpster. I made many carved boxes, small chests, spoons, spatulas, and other items from their waste stream. Then, as I began to take orders, I purchased wood from their “shorts” for my projects. A short is a remainder of a plank after what is needed is cut off. It’s too short for most work but too good to be tossed. Eventually, I was a regular client coming down and purchasing planks for larger projects.
Most of the wood they milled was used for flooring and architectural trim. But because the owners were boaters, I often saw them at boat shows. They always were excited to see how their cherry, oak, and mahogany had been transformed into carved eagles, quarterboards, and chests. It was different than seeing just another flooring project.
The photos show a progression of projects from their wood, from small objects made from scrap to things made from more significant purchases. Visiting their yard was not just for business. It was an esthetic pleasure, and they always asked what I would make with the wood.
About ten years ago, they sold their business to spend some time sailing around the world. I’ll always be grateful to them for their interest and generosity.
Here is a sampler:
Surprise QuarterboardFantasy shipEagle based on the transom eagle for the first USS PennsylvaniaWooden flowersMast hoop tray featuring the burgee of the​ Corinthian​ Yacht Club.
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