Caving, day III

After a three-week hiatus I was back at St Anastasia’s and got a day in on my summer carving project.  I was mostly refining the face and head shape. The shoulders have been thinned down and the face is close to its final proportion with the body. The head and face will likely get a little thinner to match the body.  Next session I’m going to refine the arms and hands a little more, but mostly focus on the face. Ultimately the body is going to be fairly stylized, while the face is going to be a more refined focal point… 

Large Scale Carving: Day 2

Here’s the end of day 2, with another ~4 hours in it. The hands and arms are starting to take more shape, and the angle of the head is a bit clearer. I’m unfortunately going to have to take a two week break as other things intervene, so I coated all the exposed surfaces with oil to try and minimize the cracking. 

Large Scale Carving: Day 1

Here is the product of a solid half day of roughing work with a combination of hand tools and my trusty $80 Craftsman electric chainsaw. You can see the head and arms starting to take form pretty clearly. I’m working from a combination of a scale drawing and a full size cartoon/silhouette pattern of the head and hands. As usual I drew the pattern out from sloppy measurements and once starting have found them slightly too big…

Large scale carving, the raw material

I recently started work on a large scale carving at St Anastasia’s church, 1095 Teaneck Road, Teaneck NJ.  I’m carving a life size Virgin Mary into the standing trunk of a large softwood that died recently.  It’s been exciting to get to work this large.

Here’s a picture of what I started off with. The bottom 8 feet of the tree were left standing by the tree removal people. I needed to start by trimming it down a foot and a half, and picking what angle the figure fit into the trunk, which has a pronounced lean.