Damn dinosaurs
Was watching Conkers Live this week and Stewart Furini was demonstrating spiralling and texturing (something I’d like to have tooling to do more of…) but at one point during the demo, he’d finished some spiralling and had painted and sanded back the piece and this was the result:
It was quite striking at the time and reminded me of something and it took a few minutes to place it:
I don’t have a spiralling tool but I do have carving tools. So I grabbed a blank…
It’s an odd shape, you’re looking at the bottom of the bowl here – I wanted it to fit my hand and to be a little closed over (turned out, it’s a lot closed over). Printed out the scratch marks from a jpg on the web…
Cut those out with a sharp knife, then put cellotape over the sheet and stuck it to the blank, then cut along the edges of the scratches through the cellotape and tidied up afterwards.
Then out with the v-tool gouges and a 5mm straight chisel and the sharp knife and I carved out the scratches.
Next up, ebonising lacquer.
Might have overdone that a little 😀 Worse, didn’t seal the wood first, so after sanding back…
That bleeding of the lacquer couldn’t be sanded away, it’s in there too deeply. In the end, I had to take the gouge to it again, cut the surface back by a millimeter or so, re-sand to 180, re-carve the scratches and then seal the surface and gave the area round the scratches two more coats of sealer, then masked off the area and ebonising lacquer again:
And then sanded back and this time it didn’t look bad so I hollowed it out (and going by the screaming noises I either need to get better tools for this or just get gud scrub), then flipped it over and used the push plate to tidy up the foot. Few coats of danish oil, some yorkshire grit and then a final coat of hampshire sheen wax got added along the way.
I kinda like it 😀
