Sunday, November 6, 2011

Stone carving in a trailer???

This past weekend I attended a stone carving workshop in Hobbs sponsored by Southwest Stone Carving Association at Sadler and Son Monument Works. Stone carving doesn't have a thing to do with rebuilding a trailer but I have never done any carving of any sort and have always wanted to learn. So, when the opportunity arose, I signed up and had a blast.

Class started Friday at 8:00am. We had 6 students to start but by the end of the day we 9 or ten with a couple more planning on showing up on Saturday. Edward Fleming from Galesteo, NM, John Griffin from Albuquerque, NM, and Kat Watson from Questa, NM were our instructors. All were accomplished sculptors and were a great help for all of our questions and blank looks on our faces as we began our workshop. Well, at least I had a blank look on my face.

For my project I was going to try to carve a Chachapoya Indian stone face like this one
I got my piece of stone and started carving, chipping and filing. It ended up looking like this

Well, it's sort of close. I think mine has been on an American diet. He turned out a little obese. LOL  I even carve a surprise on the bottom of the stone. The only problem is that I finished this one the first day and we still had two more days to go. So, I had to find another project to take up the next two days. 

After searching on the net for different ideas, I found an owl that Patsi really liked, so I thought I'd try that is a piece of alabaster. The owl that was my pattern looked like this
The piece of alabaster that I picked wasn't quite thick enough to get the barrel shape of my model, so I ended up doing a double sided owl that turned out like this
He turned into a horned owl and I left him with a couple of rough edges, so he is smooth on both sides and one edge with the left side raw stone and some of the raw stone showing on the top as well.  I still need to sand him quite a bit and polish him but I think both turned out ok for my 1st try. The stone will look really cool once it is polished, plus I had a great time and met some great people. David and his wife, Cindy, were great hosts. The instructors, Ed, Kat, and John were great and were always ready to help with any problem you had. A fantastic weekend and I learned that stone carving isn't quite as complicated or hard as I thought it might be. That's not to say that it is easy, it just seems to be a little easier once you learn some of the techniques. Before the workshop I assumed it was all hammer and chisel, but that is far from the case.

Tomorrow it's back to work on my projects, here around the house, getting ready for winter and getting back on the trailer.

Until next time.......

Overthehump


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