Glad to have my son helping this summer. He just turned 11.
Mountain goat, close up
Latest carving, mountain goat in Frisco, CO, really just a silly goat on a precarious pile of rocks. Real mountain goats ears go sideways, they have thick necks, and their beards don’t look like the one on this goofy goat. It was inspired by my blue goat drawing.
Wildlife carvings nearing completion in Blue River, CO just south of Breckenridge.
This is the 10′ tall pack rat I carved for the Whittle the Wood carving competition in Craig, CO last week. Didn’t win, didn’t expect too, but had a great time meeting other carvers and got a lot of great tips from them. And Craig really went over and above taking care of the carvers. I’d definitely do it again.
Here’s yet another thing one can do with a bunch of dead lodge pole pines. This is work in progress in my front yard. We plan to seed between the pavers with some low growing plants like thyme or Irish moss. You’re probably saying, won’t it rot out? Yes, of course it will. So what. All I’ve got into it is sweat equity. When a disk gets too bad, I’ll just fire up my chainsaw and replace it in a matter of minutes. I will seal the tops and my guess is that they will last at least several years. My house faces East, so it’s a lot cooler out front in the evening. I suppose I’ll have to build some Adirondack chairs now. Can’t wait to fire up the chiminea, crack open a cold one, and enjoy our new free patio.
I recently built a booth to take my work festivals and art shows this summer. This is something new for me. Staying busy with commissioned work I had no inventory. I really don’t ever have time to build much of anything for myself. So I took some time over the past few weeks to get some carvings done, I made frames from beetle-killed lodge pole pine, framed up some of my drawings, and built a booth mostly out of scraps from Hesters Lumber Mill in Kremmling. I took it to two small events to learn the ropes, before trying to get in to any larger shows later this summer.
Made front page with my current project.
Here are some drawings I did for the carvings that are currently in progress.
Here’s a few drawings I’ve done recently.
Breckenridge Snow Sculpture
Breckenridge Snow Sculpture
I did this snow sculpture in Breckenridge during the Budweiser International Snow Sculpture Championships. Designed for kids to play on, it was not part of the competition. It was a huge hit. Perhaps too huge. Too impatient to wait in line for the slide on the second day it was open parents had the brilliant idea of boosting the kids up into the tunnel eight feet off the ground. Needless to say the sculpture took a beating, the tracks being trampled and the miner’s legs broken off. No respect.
Small job, but more to it than looks like. This log bunk bed was built without a rail. Now it has one.
My 10yr old son Shawn and I made more than a dozen of these for Christmas presents.
These candles make great inexpensive unique gifts.
I took a diversion from my usual medium and entered an amateur snow sculpting competition in
Breckenridge. I didn’t win, but I was pleased with my sculpture and the effort got me signage on Breck’s
main street through the holidays. The sculpture is titled Short Lived Success and consists of a miner
who strikes it rich, comes to town with his burro to celebrate, and has his gold stolen.
Fun diversion into snow sculpting.
This 500 sq. ft. log deck is just about done. Plexiglas is going where the banisters would normally be,
and I’m just waiting on hardware to come in to put that up. It’s 14′ wide and 33′ across the front of
the main structure. The stairs are 12″ diameter half logs. The decking is full length 14′ cedar 2″x6″.
It’s not art per se, but I still felt like there was an artistic element to the project, the design and the hand craftmanship, hand peeling and fitting of the logs and mortise and tenon joinery. The end result has character and a feel about it that you just can’t get from dimensional lumber and composite deck boards.
After the Summit Daily article I received a lot of calls from people wanting trees carved. I’ve had to keep customers waiting for a while as I’ve been tied down building a 500 square foot deck and had a baby come in the middle of the project. Here’s a few pictures of trees I will be carving. One location has 11 and another has 9.
This summer I bought a house, ripped out shag carpet, put in hardwood floors throughout, had a baby girl, and got a Great Pyrenees puppy. Am I missing anything? Oh yeah, and I built this deck. Just a little more work to go.
Before
After
I’m not in the business of installing hardwood floors, but I did install my own birdseye maple flooring in my new house, and I’d love to do some custom inlay work if the opportunity arises. That would go hand in hand with my carving and drawing work. These floors are getting a tung oil finish this weekend.
Threw this little wash basin together to put in the little cabin I built last fall. It’s made from relcaimed old barn wood, which had already been reclaimed into a shacky little shed on the side of my house, and the skid my new hardwood floors came on.
See more photos in the wood gallery. Also doing a large log deck on the back of the house. By the way, these are beetle-killed lodgepole pine logs.
Log porch made from beetle-killed lodge pole pine logs.
Summit County artist carves trees on the spot
This is a new project of mine and another Wordpress based web design. Check out Drawbuck.com.
A collage of some recent work; practice, unfinished, unsatisfied, etc…
The old building was coming out ok, but just ok, so I’m planning to start over again on it in a larger format paying extra special attention to getting the perspectives right.
The gold panner taught me that when you’re working with ink it’s a good idea to get the face right first. I was pleased with the 2nd attempt, focusing on the shadows. I could have finished him up, but he’s just a little sketch and the face was the hurdle, at least for me, the rest was all downhill.
Pen and Ink
Walnut ink is a favorite. I like the look and it flows well from the pen. And it paints as a wash. But it’s not waterproof.
Pen and Ink
Actually, I did this with a plain old rollerball pen. I’ve been playing around with a lot of different pens lately, weighing the pros and cons. This was a .5mm Pentel. I like the ink of the Pentel as it’s crisp, deep black, and blends well. Better than the Pilots I’ve compared. But when I went to erase a few lingering pencil sketch lines the ink smeared. Not good. Also, I can’t get as fine a line as I like with any of the consumer pens I’ve tried. Still, the drawing turned out pretty good I think, for work on the cheap.
Pen and Ink
This took some time. A lot of detail here. Done with dip pen, Hunt 102 nib, and India ink.
I know it looks like some sort of fantasy tree, but it’s actually incredibly true to the real thing.
Pen & Ink
That’s the short of it. The long of it is there’s a bit of walnut ink wash, a mix of color acrylic ink, and a little watercolor.
I carved these mushrooms for Christmas gifts out of local standing dead aspen. They are about 2′ tall and each is unique as I did not use any pattern and just winged it based on what I thought I could do with the piece of wood. They will look great in a flower bed come spring and I like that they are something different from the usual bears.
This is a playhouse I built for a customer in Keystone along the Snake River near the stables. The logs are all local beetle-killed trees and the door and shutters are made from old skids. I hand peeled the logs, mixed my own chinking, and split the shingles to give it a more rustic, been there a long time, look.
Yes, finally done!
[/caption]
Two bears gettin' after the honey carved out of this dead spruce
[/caption]
This was great project. The carving process was relaxing most of the time. But it was rather daunting and complex. I worried quite a bit that something might go wrong; mismeasure, lop off an ear, take to much wood off somewhere, the tree might be rotten in the middle, … And it seemed that I might not ever complete it. But still I really enjoyed it.
It doesn’t look like this could have came out of that tree. It’s an optical illusion. I took a couple feet off the top and shrunk everything down to scale.
Looks a little glossy now but the finish is still wet. It will mellow out to nice satin.
In total the project took about two weeks to complete.
Just completed: custom mantel for fireplace being refaced. Piece is 5″ x 14″ x 90″ cut out of a 20″ diameter beetle-killed lodgepole pine. That’s a Stihl 660 (2nd largest) with a 25″ bar, a real beast, making the log look smaller than it is. That hog ripped the crane right out of the floor of my trailer. Beats grinding it up into mulch.
The first drawing is Pen and Ink, the next four watercolor and pen and ink, and the last one is a linocut print. Pen and Ink is what I’m best at, I’m struggling with adding watercolors to infuse color into my drawings.
Pencil, quick sketch.
A site I just completed. It’s a portfolio design using Wordpress for a content management system.
Seriously heavy duty custom bench, 6 feet long X 18 inches wide X 5 inches thick. See more pictures in the Wood gallery.
Completed totem pole; raven, sun, elk, bear, beaver.
A totem pole I carved recently was featured on the front page of the Summit Daily News on Friday, September 5, 2008. I carved the pole using chisels and chainsaws from my own design. You can see more pictures in the Wood gallery.
Sharpie and colored pencil.
A mountain goat from the minds eye. The result seems to capture the precarious precociousness of real mountain goats and our own lives, of life on the edge, living on the brink and being subtly aware of it, yet only mildly perturbed by it, in our and the goats innocence, ignorance, and day-to-day callous. And most of all, being there, on top of the mountain, for no better reason than just to be there.
Or it’s just a silly blue goat.
