Tomorrows carving. It has been a long carving coming. I started it early this week hoping to get this post up so everyone could see, but we got a call from some friends to go camping and I had to finish it later than I wanted. I did have a good time carving while I was camping and on the down side my daughter lost my Wife's wedding ring.  This carving is long overdue so here you go. This will go on Ebay on the 26th of July.

Here is a general face. You can see the mustache and beard. The hair and hat are still to come.

When I was Camping I finished this carving. In the picture below I still am working on details of the beard and am not done with the hat yet.

Here is one of my favorite carving sticks so far this year.  This is a wizard caving and reminds me of Gandolf. I have also have decided that I would like to try out Etsy. This is something I have been going to do for some time but I have never gotten around to getting anything listed. I am not sure how you find everything on Etsy, but my shop is called Carvingwood.  You can also search "B. Madsen" and it should bring up my carvings I have listed.

Here is one my first walking stick that I have done in over a year.  I have also have decided that I would like to try out Etsy. This is something I have been going to do for some time but I have never gotten around to getting anything listed. I am not sure how you find everything on Etsy, but my shop is called Carvingwood.  You can also search "B. Madsen" and it should bring up my carvings I have listed.

Here is my first walking stick that I have done in over a year.  I have also have decided that I would like to try out Etsy. This is something I have been going to do for some time but I have never gotten around to getting anything listed. I am not sure how you find everything on Etsy, but my shop is called Carvingwood.  You can also search "B. Madsen" and it should bring up my carvings I have listed.

I started with aspen stick that I cut down and let dry for 4 weeks in the dry heat of Wyoming (which works well). Below is the stick before I started.

I am trying to get the shape of the nose and the eyes. The branches on each side of his head will add character the stick.

I have the rough outline of the entire face before I start with the details.

You can see the mouth developing and the eyes are rounded off so I can start putting in the eyeballs. You can see the one eyebrow will be slightly raised.

In the next couple of pictures you can see the teeth and eyeballs are in and most of the small details around the jaw.

Here is something new for me I do have some progress pictures that I will attach later, but I just wanted to share these with everyone.

Mountain Man

Man in the wood!

We went camping this week as a family and found this Pine knot.  I started to carve the back side of this knot only to find out that it was rotten about 1/2 inch deep. So I smoothed the backside off and started to carve the front. I had not carved a pine knot for a long time so I had to work a little harder then I do with the cottonwood bark.

You can see in the above picture that I have started to shape the face. You can start to see the nose and where the eyes will be. You can even see the mouth a little.  The eyebrows turned out nicely because it was the natural color of the wood.

In the two above pictures you can see I have started to carve the upper part of the eye. I used a stop cut and  then feathered everything to that cut.

I have the eyes finished. Once I finished the shape of the top of the eye I made another stop cut for the bottom of the eye.  The last things I did was put the mustache and beard along with the wrinkles under the eyes for a little caricature.

Here is the carving I will post this on Ebay this Saturday and if you have any questions about how this spirit carving was made please feel free to ask. Thanks for looking!!!

Here is something new for me. I got the chance to spend sometime with Tyler Borg http://www.tylerborgwoodcarving.com/. This guy can carve anything. He is amazing. He was showing me how to carve this wildlife scene. This was fun and I would like to thank Tyler for the time he spent helping me out with this carving.

I am going to try and do a couple more of these over the next couple of months. This was a nice challenge and made me realize how little I know about relief carvings.