Cat's Eye Carving

Large waves!

Well here are the photos of my latest carving.

I am using a beautiful piece of hard Tetbury limestone from Veizeys Quarry. It has some very interesting fossils running through it, I have found a piece of coral, some beautiful shells and loads of Gastropods!

Having The Gloucester Geological Conservation Trust at The Tithe barn centre is  really exciting for me as I am always finding interesting fossils-they also help to give me a greater understanding of the stone that I am carving!

These photos show you how the stone was before I started carving.
The surface was speckled with beautiful small gastropods-small spiral fossils. Once I had chipped off this layer-which was actually quite sad, I uncovered a beautiful consistant limestone. On 2 opposite sides there was a sparkly layer of Calcite-crystallised stone and the cement that holds the ooliths together.

This was tricky to chip off as it is incredibly hard, with the underlying stone was  hard as well.

I had a drawing to work from, but this soon became redundant as I developed the shapes and followed the forms.

The next series of photos shows the stone as I am carving it now. Using my engine crane and blocks I was able to stand the carving up. The previous photos show the carving laying on it’s back. There was only so much I could do with the stone in this position.

Hopefully you can see the shapes beginning to form. At the moment all the carving that I have done has been with the punch and hammer-obviously I do start off with the pitching chisel, but this is only for a short while.

As the roughing out process develops, I can start to introduce other chisels. The claw to start to refine the surfaces, the draft or inch chisel to introduce the lines and clarify the developing forms. This can be seen more in the next series of photos.

Obviously there is still plenty of work to do, so as soon as there are more photos, I will show them in a new post.