The art of wood carving…
Placement 1 And the awful start…
In October I finished the 10 week ‘live build’ as part of Building Crafts Programme with the The Princes Foundation (blog post still to come!) The build had been amazing but exhausting and I was well overdue a week off. So as you do, I booked out a canal boat for me and friend in the Yorkshire Dales. On the way down from Scotland I dropped off my tools and some kit at my first ‘placement’ in Cumbria… O.K. so where is this going? …
Well, whilst having a splendid time floating in the Dales, the placement I was supposed to be working at was broken into and the swine’s emptied the whole place out! They stole tools that took me years to acquire. Old chisels, planes, squares, saws, you name it! all with their own stories and tales to tell. All of a sudden I was tool-less and my first placement had been snatched away from my hands… I was really gutted, tools have such sentimental value but I couldn’t help but feel more sympathy towards my placement provider who lost much, much more…
The 2 Andy’s…
So not the best of starts!…
Luckily enough though the chaotic turn of events landed me on a 4 week placement at a traditional joinery company called Houghtons of York. Houghton’s have an amazing workshop full of highly skilled craftspeople that create real top end joinery. Their range of work covers conservation, new build and restoration so the workshop was bustling with interesting projects. I gained a lot from my time there but the best part by a long mile was the last week with the master carvers Andrew & Andy…
Using dividers and templates to mark out the Egg & Dart mouldings…
Andrew & Andy (or Andy & Andrew) are the two resident carvers within the Houghtons team, something which is pretty rare these days in a joinery workshop as sadly the craft has become quite redundant in recent years… But when the projects in the workshop began to run dry, i offered to help the carvers in meticulously measuring and marking out egg & dart pattern on lengths of moulded oak. The task was not the most interesting but the 2 Andy’s taste in music was on point so it helped…
To repay my kindness, the 2 Andy’s offered to take me under their wing for a few days and give me a little snippet into the art of carving…
The carved ‘finial’ for the Dumfries estate gates
Previous to the crafts programme, my carving experience was nothing more than a few spoons. During the live build I did carve a finial for the oak gates (which turned out surprisingly well considering I had no experience in carving!) but I kept that on the hush and cleared my head of any prior carving know-how to start afresh with these guys.
So, they started me with something they get any beginner to do. I was told make a wooden potato…
Eh? a potato? Where is this going again? …
…Well, the idea was that you learn the knack for using both the chisels and the mallet to create something simple, in this case it was a potato! From there it is carved to make an Owl!…
For these carvings I was using a Lime wood or something similar at least which has very close grain so it makes for much easier carving.
Andrew let me use some of his many chisels and his beautiful mallet which was turned from a piece of oak and a Lignum Vitae bowls ball. He has a chisel for every use, there’s not a chisel he doesn’t have in his many boxes that he’s gathered over the years…
I soon picked up the technique, it was easy to find myself getting fully absorbed into a carving bubble where time would just warp. I’d pick up the chisel and mallet and then (what felt like 5 minutes later) 2 hours would have passed and it would be time to make a cuppa. I guess that is one of the many benefits of working directly with a natural material, it is undoubtedly therapeutic.
I wanted to carve a barn owl, so the sketchbook came out and I had a guide to work towards. The technique was just a case of working slowly in stages to form the owls face. First of all forming the ridge of the beak and then forming the bowls of the eyes. For this I did a few practice runs on a scrap piece of Lime, the technique is the same as what Andrew uses to form the ‘egg’ part of the ‘egg & dart’ moulding…
Then i was simply winging it until an owl was formed really (If you’ll mind the pun) Leaving the gouge marks in the wood was intentional, I aimed to paint it white and then carefully sand back the ridges to add a depth of texture to it.
One night during the week I found a lady living locally who was selling her dads old carving chisels… I didn’t hesitate in snapping them up for a good price. So alongside the carving I soon got to grips with the fine craft of sharpening gouges and V profile chisels.
Carving Oak leaves.
Andrew then gave me free reign to carve whatever I wished and since it was mid-Autumn I thought it would be the best time to try my hand at carving an oak leaf…
I grabbed a fallen leaf and sketched it in many positions until I found something I was happy with and then transferred it onto a blank piece of Lime wood which i fixed to a ply base and then screwed to the bench…
Then, I worked slowly to stamp around the leaf shape outline, choosing chisel profiles that fit the curves and straight sections of the leaves…
I drew a line around the sides of the wooden piece 10mm below the face, this was my depth marker, All I had to do then was gouge out the negative space around the leaf…
I always seem to overcomplicate things and so I decided to add a second leaf below the original which required a new level of intricacy. Basically the technique from here on was just a case of stamping around the leaf, undercutting slightly, and then gouging the negative until the leaf became more and more pronounced…
Finally, in the last hours of my time at Houghtons I started to create the folds of the leaf which was a very delicate job which required you to make adjustments on the fly and trust the movements of the chisel…
Sadly I didn’t get the leaf finished! I ran out of time and since then my carving chisels have done nothing more than adjust a few treads on an oak staircase. I’m really going to try to put aside an afternoon and get the leaf carving finished before the lock down is over. So keep an eye out for that on social media…
On reflection…
If anyone is looking to dip their toes into a spot of wood carving I would highly recommend these 2 projects for both a beginner and an intermediate project.
As for the 2 Andy’s… i’d like to say a massive thank you to them both for sharing their incredible talent...
Check out the ‘Houghtons of York’ website link below to see more intricate carvings by the 2 Andy’s …