Failure

With every winner, there must be losers.

As I get into my woodworking practice, there's going to be learning curves that will either take me down a road of glorious ephiany or throw me down the deepest depths of my own self-loathing.

This bastard lead me down the latter.

You might not see anything wrong per se, but as someone who has been working on this style and it's predecessors years now(1) I can tell when something just isn't working. This guy just didn't cooperate with what I wanted to do.

You might ask, "it isn't finished, how do you know it's a failure?", and my answer is to blame the tools and materials(2) but not for the reasons you think. This is specifically down to the circumstances that lead to this impasse. So let's start from the beginning.

This is the sketch that I based my sculpture on. I drew this about a year ago around the time that I switched jobs. I wanted to make this design ever since, it's one of my favourites. The spiral, the subtle curves(3), the way in my head that it would just shimmer with the sunlight when it hits the design just right. I dreamed of this for a long time but never actually made it.

Until now.

I hacked away at the wood until I had the desired shape of the design, adding chamfers at the yellow points to elevate and highlight the area to carve. It was going so well at that point that I decided to start carving the swirls and intricacies.

That's where the problems arose.

You see, when it comes to wood, you are fighting against straws. Everyone explaining wood grain always uses straws and it works, so I'll just carry that analogy. As you cut you are severing the fibres that make up the wood. if you cut along the fibres you will get a nice clean cut, if you cut against the fibres you are more likely to pull the fibres and ruin all your hard work. This happened to me during this sculpture.

You can see at the top of this picture a massive knotch out the side of the side. I didn't want this, but the wood did. I was working with the grain but at a very small point where I had to sever the fibres at the top before moving forward. Unfortunately, the grain at that point was loose and broke. No matter how sharp the blade or how hard the wood is, this is something you just can't avoid. Sometimes the wood just breaks.

Because of this, I tried to save the sculpture by cutting deeper. This didn't and did work. It solved the grain, but now the design was ruined. I was using techniques more equivalent to chip carving here, and with chip carving, you need a consistent angle of cut to get the desired effect. Go to shallow, you won't get any shadows. Go to deep, and its all shadow. This is what happened to me.

To highlight the grain problem, here was the point of death for this chunk of basswood. After cutting the design in, I noticed that all my lines are following the fibres up the sculpture. No matter how I approached it, the softness of the wood would mean that the problems from before would surface again, meaning that blow out was more than likely to happen again. Basswood is a lovely wood, but this design, for me, was calling for a much harder wood. Oak, Cherry, Ash. I didn't have any of that so I left it.

When I say I left it, I got frustrated and threw it on the ground. Sometimes you just need to let it out I guess.

So what can I do in the future?

I'm going to work with harder woods. Woods that allow for more maneuverability in that way its carved. Oak at the moment is my favourite along with Cherry, but come with their own problems. I'll need to keep my chisels and knives sharp more consistently, as they will blunt with use quicker. But that's part and parcel of the art of carving!

What will I do with the sculpture I want to burn? Nothing I think. I want to explore natural weathering. I'll likely place it in the garden and allow the sun and the rain do their thing to it and see what happens. I want to put this objects in the real world sometime in the future, but to do that I will need to see what kind of things happen to the different woods in the wild. How do the curves and cuts work with the rain? Does it split? Does it go moss? How does moss interact with the carving? Will the sun help it 'sing'(4)? All of these are important to consider I feel.

(1) a whole 5 years I might add. Not a master, but I know what I'm talking about.

(2) "A bad craftsman blames his tools"

(3) My god, it even has a watermark. (Well more of a coffee stain to be honest)

(4) It's the best way I could describe it. The sunlight with the carving is a type of harmony that I love. It doesn't sing to me, then its a bad song. But equally, you could say that its a song that nature wants to sing and once I surrender my sculptures to it, I should dictate how it's interacted with. Something to think about?