Initial Carving Stage

I started of with a block of Lime about 6" (150 mm) wide by 16" (400 mm) height by 4" (100mm) thick. At this stage you can see I had already drawn in the rough shape of the head and body on the side of the block with a pencil.






I then carved out the rough shape for the top of the head and back of the body. I wanted to make sure I had got the proportions correct before carving any fine details.



As I carved the head down I kept redrawing the dragon, adding more detail to try and ensure that the eyes would end up in the right place.










I found it quite frightening at this stage and I did begin to wonder if it was ever going to look like the dragon I had envisaged. I was starting to see the head emerging though and that gave me the encouragement to continue.

Craft to Wood Art

For the first couple of years I went to lots of craft shows and continued making just craft work but even at that stage people would say my platters were too good to use and would buy them for display purposes only. This combined with a demonstration I saw on barley twists really inspired me and for the first time I released the true potential of the wonderful medium of wood.

I could use the skills I had learned at woodturning to create art in wood.

From then on I started teaching myself how to master all types of barley twist and bind work before trying to incorporate them into new artistic pieces. To my surprise I also discovered my maths actually helped, since if I carved the binds so that they were mathematically correct they would therefore look ascetically pleasing to the eye. With these skills I started producing Bind Vases, the binds of which I carved with a double curvature.

The picture above is of one of my slightly later Bind Vases that also features a triple open barley twist up through the centre of it.

The bind vases were just the start though and I realised that there was now a whole new area I could be exploring of wood art. There were other enhancement techniques I had heard about and what’s more I had ideas for much more complex and intricate artistic pieces.

Dragon Sculpture

Although I am a professional woodturner, I have slowly incorporated more and more woodcarving into each piece and finally decided to carve a snake as part of one of my sculptural forms called Guardian.

Despite the fact that not everyone likes snakes and I had actually managed to scare one or two people with the realism of the snake’s eyes, I still got a lot of positive feedback about the piece. People seemed to really like the fact that I had combined woodturning and woodcarving to produce something really different.

I hadn’t known anything about woodcarving when I had started carving the snake but after a lot of trial and error I was really satisfied with the results and encouraged to try something more challenging. My new idea for a sculptural piece incorporated a dragon about to take flight.

I will keep updating this category with pictures charting the progress of the dragon and what it looked like at each stage of the project.

Dragon Wood Sculpture

Dragon Sculpture – About my latest woodcarving piece.
Initial Carving Stage – Pictures of the initial carving of the dragon.
Carving the Dragon – Pictures of the dragon after more shaping.
Carving the Dragon - Continued – Pictures of the dragon after more carving.

Past Woodturning Experiences

Beginnings in Woodturning - How I first discovered woodturning.
Learning to Turn - How I learnt the basics of woodturning.
First Craft Show - How I went about trying to sell my work.
Craft to Wood Art - How my work changed from craft work to artistic pieces.

First Craft Show

I had no idea how to go about actually selling my work when I first started woodturning and I wasn’t too confident about even trying. In fact everyone I’ve spoken to since says that selling your own work is much harder then selling someone else’s since very few people have that much confidence in themselves.

Luckily my mother gave me a lot of encouragement and with her help I booked up my first craft and flea show that we found advertised in a newspaper. They needn’t have put craft in the name of the show though since, apart from my wood turned bowls, there were no other craft stalls there. We sat for eight hours watching people walk round buying £2 items, most of which were cracked or broken in some way. It was a disaster and left me feeling less confident about being able to make a living at woodturning.

We then tried taking my work round a couple of shops and it was only by a stroke of luck that we met a lady who not only would display my work in her gallery but also invited me to exhibit at a craft show she ran. My first proper craft show and it went really well. People wanting to buy my work gave me real confidence and I was more determined than ever to make a living at woodturning.

Learning to Turn

Although I did have a place at Exeter University to read maths I decided not to go and instead started teaching myself how to turn. I had never really thought about woodturning before and just assumed that woodturners only made items such as bowls, clocks, mushrooms, light pulls and other craft show items. After all these were the only items I had ever seen turners produce when I had gone round craft shows.

I had sort of mastered the bowl already, although I would need a little practice to achieve the quality finish I was aiming for, and so I began trying to turn the other items people generally associate with woodturning. Even at that stage I was already trying to add my own style to the simple craft pieces and so began turning various series of beads and grooves on the rims of the bowls and platters.

I couldn’t afford much at the time but a small investment in a couple of videos that were going really cheap made a big difference. For the first time I found out about two main types of turning, spindle turning or faceplate turning and what’s more that you used particular chisels for particular jobs. The general rule was that spindle gouges were used for spindle turning and bowl gouges for faceplate turning.

With the aid of the video’s I tried to master all the techniques shown, at the same time as expanding the range of craft work I was producing. It was hard at first but I gradually found that, with perseverance, as my skills at turning increased I was getting a better finish with the chisels, which meant less sanding was required to get a good overall finish.

Now all I had to do was to find a way to sell the work I had made.

Beginnings in Woodturning

I first started turning when I was 19. I had just moved with my parents down to Cornwall and my dad was turning some handles for the furniture he was making for the new house. Despite woodworking being my dad’s hobby it had never really interested me but woodturning on the other hand looked fascinating and so I asked if I could have a go.

Somewhat reluctantly my dad relinquished his prized shopsmith to me, after having gone through numerous strict safety instructions. With some bits of very cheap pine glued together and my dad’s old set of 2 spindle gouges, a skew and a parting chisel I was ready to go. I was going to turn a bowl.

I had no idea of how to turn and literally had to resort to trial and error, totally oblivious to the fact I should have been using bowl gouges as a opposed to spindle gouges. Despite this, after the first few catches that scared me half to death, I had worked out how to present the chisel at the correct angle to avoid any more. The constant fear of further dig ins probably aided me the most and I made each cut very gently and with the up most care.

An embarrassing number of hours later I had finally finished turning and sanding my bowl and I was pleased with the fact I had succeeded doing it at all. Ok so the finish wasn’t that good and there were turning lines in it but it was still satisfying to know I had created it. In fact I was so taken with wood and turning it that I realised woodturning was what I wanted to do for a living.