Wood Carving Progress: Weeks 1-5

Project: Do a wood carving that follows the prompt: "It's About Time."

Goals:

• Pick a design

• Finish a maquette

• Get started carving

I was a bit lost at the beginning of this project, but I am very satisfied with what I have so far.

I didn't have anything creative or interesting to say about the prompt. I was thinking about the piece below and I wanted to do something with a similar subject and composition.

When working on my maquette, I was using an earlier version of my idea. The composition I originally picked also needed cropping. However, the idea was there so the maquette was fired and I started carving. I eventually decided on a koi-fish-like creature that was slightly mutated and monstrous looking. The fish would be curled up on itself so it would look too big for its container. I was thinking about the myth of goldfish growing to the size of their containers. This isn't true, but the concept was so interesting to me. Do the people who believe this know goldfish exist in the wild? Taken to its logical extreme, a goldfish in the ocean would be massive.

The process of carving so far was pretty straight forward. I started by carving around the basic shape of the fish. I removed some of the areas that I knew were going to be deeper. I wanted a sense of overlap of the head and fins. I wanted the fins to start lower and end up higher. I also wanted the head to be higher than the tail. I think it worked out well.