tributesinwood

Wood Carvings by Mark Sheridan

13 Mar 2016
2 Comments

Some Clay Work

I’ve done enough detail on the car to know where I’m heading with it.  Now I want to position the driver and passenger so that I get a sense of where their bodies and paws will be positioned before I start the additional details of the clutch handle and steering wheel.

So, out came the clay today.  I used the Foredom tool and a cylindrical Typhoon bit with a rounded head to carve out the cockpit.  There’s enough room for the tops of the back legs of these little guys to just fit under the dash and make it look like they’re well extended beyond the dash.  I also ended up carving the backrest of the cockpit even further back because I wanted a nice curvature to their backs and I wasn’t able to get that with the shallower cockpit that I had carved originally.  That curve of the back allows me to lean the dogs forward and make it look like they’re fighting the wind a bit more.

This is the very first stage of the clay sculpture and once finished it’ll give me a terrific 3d model of what the wood carving has to look like.   Lots more to come this week.  Emily is on March Break so she’ll be visiting.  While we were at the Hamilton Carving Show, Emily got interested in wood burning, so she’ll be trying her hand at wood burning and I’ll do some clay sculpting!

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Posted in On The Road Again and tagged , , , ,
10 Mar 2016
2 Comments

A Quieter Racer

I sketched out a plan view ( bird’s eye view ) for the shape of the pipes by just putting the car on a piece of paper and outlining where the pipe should hug the contour of the car.  I then cut that piece out on the bandsaw making sure that I left a little extra wood for the details of a heat shield and a tail pipe extension that I wanted to add.

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Then, by holding this wavy piece of wood up against the sides of the car, I traced in the lines where I wanted the pipe moving up the side of the car and over the rear wheel.  Then that got cut out on the bandsaw…very carefully.  When I don’t have a flat surface to rest on the bandsaw table, I make sure that I’m very aware of where the wood is going to get pulled by the blade…and I always use a push-stick so that my hands are well away.

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With a bit of shaping, it all fits in pretty nicely under the chassis and over the rear wheel.

This next photo shows the progress that I made on the rear suspension leaf springs as well.  I made the rear axle assembly, epoxied it into a recess that I made and then made the leaf springs ( it actually looked a lot like a clothespin at one point ) and glued them to the axle assembly.  An Engineer at GM wouldn’t be happy with my design…but I think that most carvers would be ok with it.

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Posted in On The Road Again and tagged , ,
06 Mar 2016

Some Fast Wheels

This little roadster is in need of five new wheels…four on the road and one on the trunk.

I started out by cutting a thin slab of basswood…about 3/8″ thick to mimic the skinny tires that 1920’s roadsters would have had.  Then, with a hole saw I cut out the blank for each of the five wheels.  I actually cut out a smaller blank of thinner material ( happened to be cherry ) and glued it onto the centre so that I’d end up with a disk hub for the brakes…not that these two characters ever touch the brakes on their joy rides.

I then put these on a small hobby lathe that I have and rounded them out and added a few line for treads and whitewalls on the tires.

The whole thing was followed by the start of the front end of the wheel assembly.  More detail to come, but you can see the drive mechanism and the suspension coming into shape.  It’s also going to have a crank for engine starts, as well!

Lots of fun.

Click on the photos for larger versions…

Posted in On The Road Again and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
03 Mar 2016
4 Comments

On The Road Again

Well, at least on the road again with a new project.  This one is going to return us to our Basset Hound theme but, for a change of pace, add in a bit of motion along the way.

Here’s the start to a vintage race car piloted by a couple of fun-loving Bassets.  I’m looking forward to including lots of detail in this one like panel lines on the car, horns ( no, it won’t actually work ), lights ( won’t work either ), clutch handle ( nope ) and I’m even thinking about a spare tire on the back.  One hound will be driving and the other will be trying to hold the map against the wind.

I started this one with clay.  Now you might ask why I bothered with clay but the car actually has a lot of interesting contours and I want to make sure that it has the shape of a vintage car but that it will fit two little Bassets side by side and still look “right.”

After cutting the outline out on the bandsaw, I used a Merlin tool to do the rough contouring.  This little tool is handheld and basically has a little circular chainsaw blade at the end that spins and removes wood pretty quickly.  I followed up with the same tool but with a coarse disc that looks much like a Foredom Typhoon bit.  The two allowed me to make some pretty quick and very straight flat planes that you would expect as segments of  a car body.

Just click on these photos and you’ll see bigger versions.

 

 

Posted in On The Road Again and tagged , , ,
01 Mar 2016
14 Comments

Proud Mervin

You’ll forgive me for displaying these ribbons…Mervin got a 1st in Caricatures, 1st in Open Class and 1st Best in Show at the Canadian Carving Championships held in Hamilton Ontario this past weekend!

I had just a great time with my daughter, Emily, and we got a chance to chat with all kinds of carvers.  I took quite a few photos and I’ll get some of them posted shortly so that you can see the wide variety of outstanding carvings that were displayed.

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Posted in Hamilton Wood Carving Show, Moving Day and tagged ,
24 Feb 2016
6 Comments

A Moving Experience

All done and tied down with tea-soaked twine!  Mervin’s off to the Canadian Woodcarving Championship Show in Hamilton this weekend…

I’ll get some more photos on Flickr next week.  Just click on the photo, below, and you’ll get a larger view.

Posted in Moving Day and tagged , ,
19 Feb 2016
4 Comments

Load ‘Em Up

Well, Mervin finally has some colour and some of the load is now glued in place.  It’s looking pretty good, all in all.  You learn something new with each carving and although there are a few things that I would now do differently, I’m really pleased with the way this carving is turning out.

I picked up a nice piece of maple for a base and carved in some cobblestone and painted it using a reddish-brown and highlighted with burnt umber and yellow ochre.  In between the cobblestones is a sand coloured acrylic paint with a wash over it of the same colour as the bricks.

Notice in behind the carving there was a bit of a dead space that just didn’t look right, so I added a little sewer opening.  I like the way it fits in with the carving and makes it look like Mervin has just stepped off of the curb and is on his way down the road.

By the way, the maple was very, very hard.  I think I’ll return to a softer hardwood on my next carving.

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Posted in Moving Day and tagged , ,
13 Feb 2016
3 Comments

Assembling the Parts

I still have the Mervin character to paint, but I thought I’d spend some time in assembling his moving load.

Here’s a quick shot of some of the assembled parts.

The mattress ended up looking really nice.  It’s actually a shame to cover it with other items!  I used brass nails with nicely rounded heads and trimmed them back and then glued them in drilled holes wherever a mattress “button” should appear.  Later, I painted the brass heads and gave them a light coat of polyurethane to seal them.

This weekend, I’ll do some final prep on Mervin and get the painting started on him.

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Posted in Moving Day and tagged , ,
09 Feb 2016
2 Comments

Good Boy

Our little dog is eager to get his fill of “Good Boy Dog Chow.”

I actually came across a vintage brand of dog chow called “Good Boy” and combined that name with the old Purina checkered border on their packages.  I liked the way that it turned out as both the checkers and the label were painted to look stretched by the little dog which helps the whole image of the heavy sack getting pulled away from the moving load.

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Posted in Moving Day and tagged , ,
08 Feb 2016
2 Comments

Another Braided Rug

This is my second braided rug, the first one being included with “The Country Hound.”

I made it along the same lines…I first used a parting tool ( v-shaped ) and a knife to make channels for the line of braids and followed that up with a wood burning tool to give each row a lot of definition.  I then burned the actual braids into the lines by making individual “y’s” that looked like a herring bone design when it was finished.

The painting used three different shades of the same colour in each section.  So, as an example, the blue section consisted of a pale blue, a medium blue and a dark blue repeated over and over ( …and over and over ).  It is truly mindless work but the final result looks nice.

I finished it off with a light dusting of beige and a spray of matte finish.  I would normally use a satin urethane and then wipe away the excess, however, there are so many crevices left from the wood burning tip that it would be impossible to wipe away all of the urethane and you’d be left with a lot of very shiny areas.

I also painted the “porcelain” on the kitchen sink and made sure that I added ample water stains with some yellow-ochre.  The porcelain colour is basically white with washes of “linen.”  I then brushed several coats of white glue ( it’s actually a bit yellow in the bottle) over the whole thing to give the porcelain some depth.  It seemed to turn out pretty well.

 

Posted in Moving Day and tagged , ,

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