Above is a blue rooster; I made for my wife.
When I was in high school I used to carve swords and knives out of wood and paint them. I made a ray gun out of pine wood. It had a battery and a door buzzer in it. It also had a light bulb covered with a plastic cover at the front so that when you pulled the trigger it would buzz and light the bulb. It had the sweet smell of pine.
My father had a set of Popular Mechanic Encyclopedias he got when we were living in Chicago. I would read through them all the time. As I got good at carving, and since I had a job while in high school I bought wood and metal and made myself a crossbow. Two pieces of mahogany were glued together, carved, then stained. I made the trigger and release mechanism out of solid steel. I got a piece of car leaf spring made of very hard steel. I had to cut this with a hacksaw, and I borrowed my uncle’s metal grinder to get it down to a thickness so that it could bend. I had to make a cocking mechanism since it had about a 200 lb pull.
One day I made an arrow, cocked the crossbow, and shot it at the neighbors garage. The arrow hit the garage, and instead of going into the wall, the arrow burst into pieces. That was the last time I fired it with an arrow in it. A scary device. I gave it to my brother after I moved to Maine.
I made this fish for a good friend. A bass on Basswood.
As you can see the Maine Loon has a tick on it.
So the title has to be “Loon a’ Tick”. Gave this to our friends of many years.
This is my first carving project. I went to the Maine College of Art which was offering a five or six week wood carving course. In the first class the instructor was giving all the other students a small tree trunk to try and carve something. I didn’t want to do 3D, I wanted to do low or high relief. He just grabbed a piece of wood that came off a broken cabinet or something; it happened to be a piece of poplar. After looking at it I just imagined what it would become; I started to draw a fish. I didn’t finish it at the school, but I was able to take it home and do some finer outlines and carvings. I dubbed it “Dead Fish”. When I finished I sent the instructor a couple pictures of it; he said he was impressed. I guess I got an “A”.
You know it’s dead because the eye is crossed out. This might be for sale.
When carving a tree the first thing to do is remove its bark.
These are the tools for carving, debarking, and getting rid of difficult stuff.
It actually represents the higher level where our angry over-beings are, the earth where our cat at least lived happily, and hell, you know where hell is, you get bitten by those black, red, eight legged things all the time.