If there’s one thing I’ve noticed since I started making my wood carvings it’s the number of people who ask, or suggest, that they’d like one … perhaps as a birthday gift. I can’t say that such requests bother me particularly although, given that I’m never really entirely satisfied with what I’ve made, I’m never overly confident as to how such gifts will be received.
Indeed, I had four such requests for gifts Christmas just gone, three from family members and one from a friend looking to fill a space in their shelves. In the end none of them received any such thing, the family members getting the usual assortment of handmade sweets and cakes in handmade box and the friend received a card … these are tough times!
Anyway, I had had the notion that if anybody was to get any kind of handmade gift, a carving say, then it should probably be my mother. As I’ve said though I’ve never been entirely convinced by my talent for carving, the one piece that I was genuinely pleased with when I completed it was the first serious attempt I made, and it was a fish.
As you can see I’ve mounted the small carving on a painted background. I made this by texturing a sheet of paper with an emulsion and flour mixture that created the peaks and troughs you can see in the picture where the paint has run and welled. The paint itself was built up over a couple of sessions and darkened with deeper shades of blue, green before being highlighted with small touches of brown in an attempt to blend the fish with it’s background, so it wasn’t so stand-out-ish.
As I say the fish was my first attempt at carving anything, probably more meaningful than ‘talentful’ in that respect, anyway originally the fish had been stained with Indian rosewood stain and varnished making it very dark. I sanded this back a bit to create a lighter more distressed finish before reapplying some varnish and ultimately mounting it on the painted background.
The whole thing was then placed inside a bog-standard shop bought frame. It seems to have been well received at any rate.
Tags: art, birthday present, carved, carving, craft, fish, framed, gift, handmade, paint, painting, paper, sculpture, whittle, whittling, wood, wooden
