tributesinwood

Wood Carvings by Mark Sheridan

Archive for the tag “Caricature Carving”

01 Mar 2023
1 Comment

The True North Caricature Carvers

I really should have mentioned this earlier to everyone, but along with John Paul Andre, a fellow carver and friend who now lives in Nova Scotia, we decided to create a “Zoom-based” caricature carving group a couple of years ago.  

Our group started as a means for a few people to continue to meet and chat despite the temporary shutdown of clubs and shows over the recent past and it’s expanded now to include a prepared agenda with topics of conversation led by individual group members, a Youtube channel presenting our full one and a half hour meetings as well as individual fifteen to twenty minute segments covering the specific individual topics, and about a hundred members mostly from Ontario, but including three other provinces, a few States and three or four other countries. 

We call ourselves the True North Caricature Carvers ( TNCC ) and boast that our most northern member is from Scotland and our most southern “True North” member is from Australia!  All of our Zoom calls are held the third Thursday of each month between 6:30pm and 8pm EST.  Prior to these calls, an agenda is sent out along with the Zoom coordinates to all of the members on our distribution list.  Naturally, time zone differences and other commitments keep many of our members from attending all of our meetings, however, we normally have thirty-five or so carvers attend our calls with others reviewing the meeting and content through Youtube days after the call.

I suspect that almost everyone now has some experience in using Zoom, but if you haven’t, just go to the Zoom.us website and download their free software.  It’s easy and quick.  Once this is downloaded on your computer and after you receive my monthly summary of agenda items, you’ll just click on the link in my email message prior to our meeting time and you’ll join the call automatically.

We have many novice carvers who are just starting out in caricature carving so we really try to gear our discussions to benefit the newcomer.  In addition to discussing individual topics of interest to all caricature carvers, we’ve organized two recent “Virtual Shows and Competitions” and are planning another for the spring of 2023.  There are no costs associated with being a member of our group or with entering the virtual competitions and all of our presenters are volunteers who enjoy sharing their knowledge and experience.  

That’s about it in a nutshell.  Nothing terribly fancy, we’re just trying to encourage people to share what they know and have some fun with it.  And we’re definitely having fun!

If you think that you might be interested in joining us or if you have any questions, just let me know and I’ll get your email on my distribution list.

Oh…and we’ve printed up some vinyl stickers of our logo…so, if you’d like one for your toolbox, let me know and I’ll tell you how they can be purchased ( $3 Cdn for a sticker ).

Contact me at Mark@tributesinwood.com

Advertisement
Posted in Uncategorized and tagged ,
31 Jul 2022
4 Comments

A Head Start

As is the case with most of my carvings, my ideas change as I go along. It seems that once I see a portion of the carving, a new idea or, at least, a modification of the original idea comes along that appears to be a better fit for the final project. I’m not sure if that’s a common approach or not but it’s certainly what happens in my brain.

With this one, although I started off thinking that a grown woman would be a comical candidate for riding the mechanical horse, I ended up with the idea that a little girl in cowboy dress would be nicer. So, because I had started some time ago on a head and face of a woman, I cheated a bit and made that original head more girl-like. Basically, I kept the big eyes but rounded the face considerably for some “baby-fat”, reduced the depth of the eye sockets, shortened the chin and changed the hairdo from something fairly stylish to something with pigtails.

The pigtails were done separately, again to ensure that the grain of the wood was running along the length of the pigtail for strength. Of course, a couple of shallow ( maybe 3/16″ ) holes were drilled in to the head where the pigtails would eventually be glued.

The pigtails started out as worm-like shapes being cylindrical with some random waves or curves. My intent was to make the pigtails look like they were jostling around from the motion of the horse ride but not necessarily pinned back like she was riding a real horse in the breeze.

Once the cylindrical shapes were carved, I drew in a herring-bone pattern on the front and back and alternated between carving and using a wood-burning tool to create the valleys. I’m not sure if I have some kind of spatial orientation problem, but was it ever hard for me to imagine how one side of the herring-bone pigtail would mate with and look like the other side. I ended up carving the one side and then struggling with matching the pigtail pattern with pencil before carving the other side. I don’t know why this was so hard to picture…I guess I shouldn’t have always left it to Peggy to make our daughter Emily’s pigtails when she was a little girl.

A bit of wood burning followed to accent the hair on the head and in the pony tail. An interesting thing that I noted, as I went along, was that I had originally carved the hair on the head very flat and when I drilled the hole for the pigtails and attached them, they just didn’t look right. So, I went back and dished out the head hair around the pigtail so that it looked like the hair was being pulled up from the head rather than looking like it was a sharp 90 degree angle from the head to the root of the pigtail. That looked better. Oh, I also added a band-aid to her forehead by carving out some relief shallow relief from her forehead. I figured that her trick riding skills didn’t come without some failed practice sessions.

Painting was done in my normal fashion using acrylic paints followed with a light coat of satin finish urethane ( polyurethane ). White eyes and teeth were first added followed by flesh tones in several washes ( thin coats ). I reddened the flesh colour for around her cheeks, her forehead, tops of the ears and end of her nose as a bit of a sunburn. I used Payne’s grey as a very, very light wash under her eyes, beneath her chin and inside of her ears. Lynn Doughty suggests this method on his cowboys to indicate shadow and a bit of a five-o’clock shadow. I chanced using it on the little girl’s face to indicate shadow and it worked well as long as I kept it very thin and light. I used a combination of burnt sienna and orange in washes for her hair and eyebrows and then used basically the same colour for her freckles. I chanced using a very, very light wash of orange over her cheeks and forehead to indicate a little girl’s freckled complexion and it worked out pretty well.

And, then, the best part…I dug into one of my several boxes of broken things that I keep even though I know that I’ll never use them…and pulled out a broken guitar “b” or, second string, and made a set of braces for her beautifully forming teeth! Ha!

Lots of fun…

Posted in Trick Ridin' and tagged , , , , ,
09 Jun 2022
6 Comments

A Bit of Painting and We’re Done!

I won’t go into a lot of detail in regard to painting, but I’ll post some photos of the various sections of the carving showing the painting.

I use latex acrylic paints that you can buy at any store that sells art related items. I probably have something like thirty or forty small bottles of a variety of colours and spend some amount of time mixing various colours together to get the tone that I’m looking to achieve for a particular part of the carving.

In general, I try my best to apply “washes”, or very thin coats of paint. Too thick an application, like directly from the container, would hide all of the detail work that you carve and certainly obliterate the wood burning. A good example in this carving is the blue jeans that the little gal is wearing. You’ll notice that the several wash coats that I applied provided ample colour but never was thick enough to hide the stitching that I had burned with the wood burning tool.

Where there are wrinkles in clothing, I add a bit of a darker tone in the valleys of the folds and wrinkles to provide a darker contrast. This makes the carving look more realistic ( take a look at the folds in your own clothing and you’ll see the darker tones ) and it also makes the wrinkles and folds look deeper. I follow Lynn Doughty’s advice and keep away from using black to darken colours…I always use a darker tone of the same colour and avoid greying-out that colour with black.

An additional of a small amount of white to shoulders, elbows and knees make things look nicely worn. In this case, I wanted her clothes to look pretty crisp so I just added the whitening to the jeans wherever you’d expect her designer jeans to be worn! Once everything is painted, I added some light dusting / dry brushing using a beige to add another dimension to the painting. A light, clear, satin urethane was used as a final finish.

Just click on the photos, below, to expand them.

These are the various sections of the painted carving showing the effects of blended colours in light “washes” followed by the addition of white in worn areas and a final, light satin urethane finish.

So, she’s complete! It was a fun carving project and I appreciate you following along with me.

Posted in Pickin' and a-grinnin' and tagged , , , , ,
24 Mar 2020
2 Comments

Lord Stanley

Peggy has two brothers who happen to be Maple Leaf fans. Although I’d like to apologize to you for this, that would only make them mad and both are bigger than I am.

To keep them calm in the midst of how this year’s hockey season ended (they both firmly believed that the Leafs would go all the way this year ), I’ve made them both a little carving.

I used a lathe to initially rough out the cup. I tried initially to carve the concentric circles/levels of the cup…but it’s just too hard to get it right. I left the centre portion that would house the face and then just carved away three of the four corners. The last corner left, of course, was there for the face and particularly the nose.

I did carve over the portions that were turned down on the lathe just because I like to see the angular knife marks in a sculpture. Following the carving, I painted the face and the silver portions of the cup, blending the two together. After sealing everything with satin urethane, I applied a bit of antiquing stain just to bring out some of the detail that would have been hidden by the silver paint.

Posted in Stanley Cup and tagged , ,

Post Navigation

%d bloggers like this: