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Frame Carving Completed

Posted on July 5, 2008 by heather • 4 Comments

Day after the 4th and the sleepless night of illegal fireworks being shot off next door for hours upon hours. Gully finally gave up her nervous vigil and went to sleep. Pat played freecell until the third finale seemed to end at round about 2 am, and, I tossed and turned for a fitful while but the ear plugs softened the concussions and I went dreamily to the deck of the Man ‘O War which Post Master Aubrey was beating to quarters, guns ready for battle….

Framed up the fishing pole today so I thought I would follow up on the finishing steps to its carved frame. It took about six hours to finish the carving and the hardest part was turning that sized frame around to get the proper purchase and angles with the knife and gouges. On a smaller frame or individual panel, like the chair slats I used to carve, I would turn and turn again for almost each cut. Not so with a frame as large as my office door.

Here it is with the carving finished and ready for the next step.

I used the garage workshop, which has more ventilation, as the staining station. Depends entirely on the frame and painting but I have experimented lately with traditional wood stains, milk paint, gold leaf and even spray paint to treat the surface. This one, as you can see, wanted to show off the wood grain so I used a Minwax English Chestnut stain followed by a coat of satin polyurethane which was rubbed on and left to dry for a couple days.

The humidity is quite high this weekend so I brought it inside yesterday to give it a chance to dry out before completing the framing. There are three parts to this frame. A thin rabbeted frame holds the painting and is joined to the poplar carved panel with nails and screws as needed. Then the outside moulding is attached and all three are joined as one to support the painting panel. (More about the composition and preparation of these panels will appear in future posts.)

Here is the final product…

” … a shortage of fishing poles”

Oil on Panel 72″ x 16″ (Outside frame dimension is 80″ x 24″)

The full quote is, ” If people concentrated on the really important things in life, there would be a shortage of fishing poles. ” Doug Larson

There will be one more carved frame for the upcoming Granary Gallery show which opens in two short weeks. All new work will be posted on my HN Website on Saturday July 12th.

The countdown continues…

Stay frosty my friends, HN

Frame Carving Day One

Posted on June 27, 2008 by heather • 2 Comments

It’s a hot sultry day outside…thought I would give you a peek inside at the frame carving I am starting today. One of the new paintings for the Granary show is a horizontal of a life-sized fishing pole. It’s going inside this frame onto which I am preparing to carve a quote.

Step one is on the computer. I drew out an alphabet and scanned it into the computer. Then painstakingly separated and sized each letter. (Did this a while back so now all I have to do is copy and paste the letters needed, one at a time, and drag them into a blank graph page which I previously mocked up in Publisher. I use poplar finished boards in two sizes depending on the size of the painting. When the words are aligned, I lay them out in a separate file which has a mock-up of the actual frame size. This saves hours of what used to be hit or miss drawing of the letters directly onto the boards…erasing for spacing errors…and spelling errors, etc. When it all looks good and I have triple checked the spelling … I have Pat come and check it again. Check twice, carve once !

Then I tape the lines of words to the board and use a graphite carbon paper to trace them on. You can see my helper is at my feet every step of the way ! Out come the carving tools and a strong light at a raking angle to better see the edges…and away I go. Today I’m listening to Patrick O’Brian’s Post Captain and hearing about salty sailors rigging ships…great for hardy hand tool work.

So, now it’s 7pm and I’ve been at this since 8 this morning. Pat has just come over to call me home for supper. The hard part is done and when I started this blog page it was 5 and I expected to go back to carving…had some glitches and ….well there ya go.

As chance would have it, a magazine arrived today from my woodworking pal Peter,

Plimoth Life (he and his wife Maureen both work at Plimoth Plantation and are wicked cool humans to boot, if you haven’t checked it out already, you can link to his web site here www.peterfollansbee.com . It looks like they are both featured in a couple of articles which will make for good lunchtime reading tomorrow. I’ll post more of the carving as it progresses. Time for some shrimp pasta. What’s on your supper table tonight ?

Be well,

Welcome !

Posted on June 26, 2008 by heather • 8 Comments

Welcome ! With a nudge from Peter and a shove from Dov…I am now one with the way of the blog. Once I get the hang of it I plan to post musings from the studio, let readers follow paintings in progress, post art related information, pass along feedback from the website viewers and patrons, and along the way … open windows on this bright new world ! Stay tuned, HN

PS- I’ve just had the first ever siting of an Indigo Bunting in our yard !!!! Lunching on the mulberries just outside the studio window. Now that’s a harbinger worthy of this new beginning.