11/24/2014

This piece of wood was put through a planer for me, it was part of the stump that my vise for spoon carving is mounted on.  I have a whole stack of it I just kind of been looking at it waiting for her to tell me what it wanted to become when it grew up.

I love to draw even though I do not consider it my strongest art form.  I'm trying to get better at it though and I do love working with the wood. So since the wood has been killing me physically I decided to once again try to draw directly onto the wood.  Thus combining my love of both and giving me the opportunity to improve my drawing skills.

It started out looking like this…

Then this...

Hated it!!! And so then I discovered the magic of sandpaper. Sanded it clean and started over.

Then it looked like this…

And I liked it well enough. Then I started to apply Ink to it and it began to look like this…

And again I hated it. The vine part but the flowers are supposed to be hanging from was just too thick. I also discovered throughout this process that it sucks the life out of a micron pin and sharpie's.  And of course the larger sharpies bleed into the grain of the wood leaving no control whatsoever throughout the process of drawing. So once again I got out my sander.

And it looked like this…

And now I like it a lot. I learned a lot. This is done with nothing but a ball point pen. I definitely have to get better about line thickness. But I can live with that.  

I'm going to put screw eyes in the top of it and maybe hang it from a beautiful black satin ribbon (maybe).  I'm also going to polyurethane it to death.  I want it nice and shiny. Not sure yet though if I'm done drawing so stay tuned and you might get even more changes!