Eddie Lawson, sideways.

Eddie Lawson (on the Cagiva C591), carved in lime,viewed from the side and front this time.  You can see clearly the veneers  applied to the bike. The number boards and Cagiva logo are done in Maple, Agip logo in birds eye Maple and Ebony (which is a nightmare as it blunts the knife almost immediately) and  Madrona and stained Maple for the helmet.The bike is approximately 33cm long.

At the time I began this, the Cagiva was the most beautiful race bike to ever grace a track. A few weeks after I started it, they launched the C593 which was even more beautiful, much more curvy but I had already taken off too much wood to adapt it to the new one. Still, it's a beautiful bike and it turned out well anyway.

This, if you were wondering whether I assemble these bikes out of separate pieces, is a photo of the beginning of a carving. This is the start of a carving of Aaron Slight on a Honda RC45 commissioned by the Castrol Honda World Superbike Team together with a carving of Carl Fogarty. I start with a technical drawing of the bike and dive in very cautiously from there.
I've only recently begun to sculpt in clay first before carving. Here, I just got on with it,fraught with anxiety at making fatal errors early on, which is very easy to do. Gung ho and accuracy are uneasy bedfellows

 I just get the silhouette quite close before starting on the widths. However, I leave a couple of millimetres spare to soak up damage from tools and inaccuracies early on.

I'll show you more of the stages of how it developed into the finished article (below) soon. 

Eddie Lawson carved in Lime

This is a carving of Eddie Lawson on a Cagiva C591, carved from a single piece of Limewood and inlaid with maple, redwood, myrtle and ebony on a mahogany base

I'll show more pictures of this and some of the other bikes I've carved as the blog goes on.

Valentino's leg, the ongoing saga

 One leg finished, or maybe not. I haven't veneered anything for years so I've been reacquainting myself  with the technique as I've been going along. I may come back to this if I think I could improve it or tidy it up without causing unnecessary damage.It's always the way; by the time I finish I'll have the skill to begin.!

So, onto the other leg. This is a graphic of the moon which looks hideously tricky to approach. I'm starting with the main block of colour on the face and all the features can be laid over it.

 Some wood veneers are very brittle and break or crumble when cut down to very small pieces so sometimes, as is the case with the red veneer around the side of the face, you need to put the woods that can be re cut and overlaid upon on first. The red wood will be surrounded with dark Indian Rosewood which is very brittle when it's cut into thin lines. Had I put it on first and tried to put the red veneer down the middle afterwards,I think it would crumble. Well, that's the theory I'm sticking to today, you'll know shortly if it works.

Waving, not sanding.

I have many different carvings over the years that I want to put on this blog but carving generally is a slow business. It's very exciting at first, starting a piece, not knowing how it will eventually turn out, how well it may go. I want each piece I make to be better than the last, regardless of subject matter.

However, after the initial work, when the general shape has appeared, it becomes more methodical, slowly whittling down each element watching that I don't go too far, too thin, concentrating too much on one area without constantly relating to every other area. Little by little, all the elements slowly meld together to a point where I'm finally considering the sculpture as a whole. Now it gets exciting again, seeing the piece hinting at how it might end, but also at a point where ruin is a much more present possibility.

Anyway, point is,carvings take ages and following my progress on the veneers on Valentino's leg may begin to feel like watching paint dry. So I'll introduce some of my work interspersed with progress on the veneers.  

Here is a horse anatomy study, carved in Limewood, taken from a plaster cast of a horse study when I did a term at the City and Guilds of London Art College many moons ago. This particular sculpture crops up all over the place.It may have gained popularity with the fashion for plaster casts two centuries ago around Europe which gave us such treasures as the cast rooms at the Victoria and Albert Museum.I've seen a copy at the Leighton House Museum.  If you google "horse anatomy sculpture"  various versions appear, I think most notably the Leonardo da Vinci horse in Grand Rapids, Michigan which seems to me to be the same pose but beefier and with skin.It may well be that the sculptor of the original may have been inspired by Leonardo's drawings for his giant bronze horse Il Cavallo

   My carving isn't finished, interrupted by commissions and not returned to. I usually sand down my work as I generally aim at a sculpture that looks like the subject first and recognition of the material it is made in second. I don't like the "chiselly-sculpty" whittled look as a rule. Wood is a beautiful, warm and alive material and, in my humble opinion, doesn't need to have the gouged effect to reinforce that  it is carved wood.

 Having said that, because I usually sand my work, I wanted this horse to have all the tool marks and try my best to hide them with deft and nifty handwork LOL.Not there yet though. Lots of work still to do, but it's been so many years, I'd prefer to leave it as an unfinished study lurking on a shelf waving a powerful hoof in the air.

Entering the digital age with a chisel and a mallet

Friends have told me to get online so finally I've taken the plunge and started this blog to put some of my sculpture out into the digital world.I've been sculpting,mainly in wood, for over 20 years and have carved a variety of different subjects over the years, relief carvings, animals, furniture. What I've chosen up until now to concentrate on is motorcycle racing as I've have had an interest in bike racing for many years (in fact, racing runs in the family ).I wanted to do contemporary carving rather than restoration or apeing older styles. After all, all the old styles were contemporary once! So I mixed the two together to see where it might go.

So let's just jump in to what I'm working on at the moment.

At the moment I'm veneering some graphics onto a figure I've been carving. This is a carving of Valentino Rossi, the MotoGP rider. This is my first portrait carving and has taken an age to complete.Getting it right without getting it wrong and learning to sculpt faces has made this the most challenging piece I've ever undertaken.The eyes have yet to be veneered and the hair will be stained and then the whole figure will be oiled.

 This is Valentino Rossi, carved in Limewood standing 91cm in height. The veneers you can see are Yew for the face, Madrona burr for the suns rays and Indian Rosewood for the dark facial details.











The elements are built up bit by bit. Its not possible to create the whole image and afterwards apply it. The curve of the leg alters the relationship between each piece so they must be custom-fitted to match to it's neighbour then the hole is carved out to sink it into.

Almost finished.