Bacchus Green Man Carving
8 October, 2017 – 2:39 pmI love designing and carving and I have been carving a lot of lovely commissions both letter cutting and sculptural but as they are commissions they get picked up and then they are gone.
My latest hand carved Green Man is a design that I drew 3yrs ago and I decided it was time to make a start.
I have a lovely piece of Portland limestone which comes from Dorset, hard and dense at one end but hard and fossil rich at the other. It gives me immense satisfaction to work on something that I designed but will also give you and my visitors an idea of my carving ability to date, as obviously I get better year on year.
I will keep you updated with the progress but obviously my commissions must come first so it’ll be a few more weeks before this carving is finished.
This piece of Portland limestone is very interesting as it has Roach Bed at one end and base Bed at the other. I bought this piece of stone from a retiring stonemason but if someone commissioned a carving I would buy it from my supplier in Dorset, Albion Stone and would favour Bowers Base Bed, it has a dense matrix and a lovely pink hue.
This means that the stone cuts through various layers of quality. The Roach bed is full of fossils but also full of holes where the fossils didn’t form, this is a challenge as I need to work carefully around these weaknesses or features depending on how I approach the material. At the other end of my carving is the Base Bed, also the best quality as it has very few if any fossils in the stone and can hold a lovely crisp edge. This stone is forcing me to be more creative and inventive with the shapes of the leaves and vine.
