Going With the Grain

 Recent family emergencies will impact my ability to keep this blog updated as often as I had planned, and work will likely be progressing slower as a result. But I'll continue to plod on and do the best I can.

Since deep critical thinking is not really an option at the minute, today I mostly returned to the practicalities of engraving - this time on wood, which seems much easier to work with than even the rather soft (and at times, flaky) sandstone which I explored last week. The problems with the stone are not so much technique (which I basically picked up as I went along) but rather my own weaknesses to RSI - I used the lightest hammer I have for the purpose, but even that left my hands sore and stiff for the next day or so afterwards. I've prepared a number of experimental pieces of wood to explore the process of creating primitive figurations in this medium:

 

These long, thin sections (from surrounding farm gates, fences etc.), with vertical grain, impose limitations on what kind of designs could be explored, but I had the idea of trying out this one - a stylized war-maid, or perhaps the main character's companion, Gerthild, herself:

The wood, which has been lying outside for years, is well weathered and should carve very easily with any suitable pointed, chisel-like tool, which will allow me to vary the grip whilst working and perhaps minimize any RSI. (Previously, at the end of last year, when laboriously stripping off fragments of tissue and sinew from deer bones, I gave myself a chronic strain in my left thumb which took months to resolve, so safe working conditions are paramount now). I may also choose to limit work on future stone engraving to an hour or so per day. Getting back to the wood, and my current concern is how to match the newly-engraved, 'clean' lines to the weathered outer surfaces, so the figures don't look as if they were really carved yesterday. Leaving them outside for the limited time available before the end of the course isn't going to make any difference, so I may think about some kind of staining, or wood paint solution.