Blind Carving part 2 New sculptural wood carving from a wooden pallet

Blind Carving part 2     New sculptural wood carving from a wooden pallet

So I worked out that I would be able to do the whole carving using 9 lengths of the wooden pallet. This would give me a good amount of wood to make my coin a nice big size. As it was going to be a blind carving, each piece will look different and it may not even match with the other pieces, which I think will look good as I am sure the wood is going to warp and crack. The other thing about this piece is I am not using my good carving chisels, but using some really cheep ones that cost €16 from Lidl. In truth, I only bought them because they were €16 for the full set from Lidl. They look really good, but it is almost impossible to sharpen them as the blade steel is way too soft and also they had to be ground down which took about 7 hours or more. I also used my normal chisels and a small Bosch router that I bought years ago. The router is fantastic to get rid of the bulk of the waste.

I took the piece of wood off and carved the section. When I was finished I put the wood back but found this to be tedious, so I started doing each piece and laying them to each other as you can see in the last photo.

Soon the carving came together and it was almost finished. Once I finished each piece, I stained it with a mixture of vinegar and steel wool that dissolved in the acid of the vinegar. This mixture will react to the tannins in the wood and make it darker, depending on the wood itself. As you can see, one of the sections went a dark blue gray colour.

So this is it almost finished. You can see some of the places the nails and tacks were, and how the vinegar mix reacts with the tanins in the wood and leaves it looking darker. Each piece is slightly different and they don’t fully match up, which is kind of what I wanted. So the next post, I will show how I will finish the sculpture.