Cat's Eye Carving

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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Chinese Slate

I have just bought some beautiful pieces of Chinese slate.
It has browns pinks and yellows ochre colours running through it.
This stone offers an alternative carving material for house name and number signs.

I will also be carving some Celtic Knotwork designs in some of the pieces! 

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Geometric Slate Carvings.

Some of you may remember the Nautilus shell I researched and carved at York Minster Stonemason’s Festival last year. I decided to revisit this geometric pattern. It will be carved in slate, a simple yet elegant design which will hopefully have a similar feeling to the ripple designs that I have previously carved.

By using the Golden Sequence of Numbers it is possible to draw a spiral that has the properties of a Sunflower head, it also how some leaves and flowers arrange their petals. This is called The Law of Phyllotaxis. 

Draw a radius line, draw a small circle up close to the centre point, draw another line 137.5 degrees from the first line and draw another circle, continue going round adding more lines and more circles-all the same size at first and you will begin to see a spiral pattern appearing. Each circle will need to be as close to the centre as possible but not touching another one. See the first drawing!

I then started developing the pattern-it would be easy to just use this pattern, but not very imaginative!!
I then drew the Equiangular or Logarithmic spiral and used this as an overlay to neaten up my initial drawing. The spiral had to be developed in stages and a certain amount of artistic license is needed!

Once I had my newly formed spiral I was able to draw something that looks a bit like a galaxy, from this pattern I drew some intersecting patterns in preparation for my new carving!!

Wish me luck this will take me about 4-6mths!

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