Cat's Eye Carving

Arty, a Tetbury Limestone carving.

With this carving I was trying to move away from the stereotypical Green Man-I hope you like him!

So with the cheeky face, rams horns and an ivy beard, I think he a rather handsome chap and would make an excellant edition to your garden!

He took about 30hrs and costs £450.

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Carving a Snail Shell

So I started off with a rectangular block of Tetbury limestone. Once I had set out the geometry of this spiral I made a template and applied it to both sides of the stone.

Once carved using a series of chamfers, the stone starts to look like a large comma!!

It was time to re-apply the template to be able to carve the spiral, (look for Bernoulli/Descartes if you wish to know the geometry).

As you can see I am carving down to create the shape, this is all done by eye and touch!

Once I have the required shape, I used a series of different Bouchard hammers to texture the stone-these hammers are excellant for evening out a surface, they look like meat tenderisers!!

I used this finish as the stone was so hard and shelly it would have been incredibly difficult to sand and polish!

This took about 30 hrs and costs £400.

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A house name in a wall!!

It’s always rather good when the customer asks me to not only carve the house name, but also to cut out the hole and build it into the wall!!

This lovely house name is carved in Forest of Dean Sandstone and the lettering style is a decorative Versal and was widely used in the 9th and 10th century to decorate manuscripts!

The stone was 24x12x3 inches and the letters were 3 inch capitals painted black.

The wall was built out of Blakeney Sandstone and was ridiculously hard-it took about 5 and a half hours to prepare the hole and 1hr to fix in the house name and point it up.

I use only lime mortar to build with.

So with all the work and the price of the stone, this costs £565.

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Watery Gargoyle

Well here is my latest commission, 28 inches high and carved in Forest of Dean Sandstone!

Obviously I tooled the surface of the stone to give the surface a clean finish-rather than just having the saw marks!
Once this was complete and I marked the area for carving I started carving the depth in order to bring the nose out!!
It was important to create the features together rather than work on one section at a time to ensure there was unity in my carving.

Once I had got all the features mapped out, I started to add  finesse to the lines and forms!

Obviously a water feature needs to have a hole so this was the next stage-this also enabled me to finish carving the mouth, I made a tongue out of lead to throw the water away from the stone.

Here he is working in situe. The customer decided not to use the lead tongue in the end!

This is about 25hrs work and with the cost of the stone, is priced at £ 950.

Please get in touch if you would like to know more!

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Commissions

You will be pleased to hear that my order book for commissioned sculptures is filling up.
This does mean however that there is now an 8wk waiting list for new pieces, I can fit small commissions in such as house numbers.

I appreciate that it is still early but if you have an idea for a sculpture or some lettering that you want to give as a Christmas present, please get in touch with me as soon as possible.

You may be interested to hear that I have started using a different colour Forest of Dean Sandstone, it is grey, green and brown and obviously offers an alternative to the red that I use.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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