Carving Found Wood

Attention, woodcarvers! Create beautiful carvings from natural materials like cypress knees, burls, driftwood, and weathered wood. Here are tips, techniques, and an amazing gallery from today's top carvers. Discover how to create amazing woodcarvings from "found" substances like driftwood and weathered wood! Part of the magic of woodcarving is taking a raw block of wood and molding it into a form with features, details, and texture. The book includes an incredible gallery from today's top carvers as well as scavenging and woodcarving tips, techniques, and methods. It also includes step-by-step tutorials that can walk the woodcarver, regardless of their experience, through the entire woodcarving project. Each project is presented by renowned and acknowledged expert carvers and artists that specialize in finding "diamonds in the rough." They look at a piece of used wood and see its potential, mapping out a design and carving it to bring a piece of leftover, weathered wood into the status of woodcarving masterpiece. Artists that are included: Jack Portice, Carol Jean Boyd, Debbe Edwards, Rick Jensen. David Neener, Marshal Artime, John Burke, Jim Wright, Gary Falin, Renee Manning. Each of these artists is an expert carver, world-class creator, and superb scavenger for found wood. In addition to tips on where to find found wood, the book also offers artist insight into why found wood is a superior carving product and why every artist has a connection with the material they are working with. Once you read this book, take in the breathtaking photographs, and connect with the artists, you will never look at a used piece of wood the same again. If you are looking for a new challenge that uses your carving skills and teaches you how to see unpolished gems in everyday items, this book is for you. Carving found wood is the ideal book for woodcarvers who are looking to move beyond the typical store-bought block of basswood. Here in this book, woodcarvers will find techniques and inspiration for turning materials supplied directly by Mother Nature into stunning works of art. The introduction to this book lays out the divisions in the carving world and the need for this type of book. In the field of woodcarving, artists use either lumbered wood that has been cut into blocks of an appropriate size, or they use wood in its natural form. The latter includes burls, cypress knees, driftwood and even stumps, and is the focus of this book. The co-authors of this book, carvers themselves, have spent the past two years interviewing top artists in the woodcarving field who exclusively use found wood for their finished carvings. *Full-color photographs of each projects *A gallery from today's top carvers *Scavenging and woodcarving tips, techniques, and methods *Step-by-step tutorials