Carving or painting? The emblem of the Hull City Tigers made using woodcarving techniques, wood bleach and stain

This piece was commissioned as a surprise gift for some fans of the Hull City football (or soccer for readers in the US!) team.

At first, I considered carving the emblem in relief but felt that it would lose something if made too different from the two-dimensional version. The tiger was carved with a Dremel rotary tool and some traditional gouges instead. 

The Dremel gave texture to the fur and more definition to areas like the mouth.

It still didn't jump out enough, so I decided to use stain and bleach to 'paint' the design too. This would hopefully allow the oak timber to show through without covering it over, in the way that paint often can.

The stain was Colron dark oak. This is suitable for indoor use - many exterior dark oak stains such as 'Rustins quick dry' can be very thick and obscure wood grain details. I particularly liked the way that this stain could be painted over to give a deeper tone - similar to watercolour paints.

Next, the bleaching. There are several kinds of wood bleach on the market. Some (such as Liberon wood bleacher) are oxalic acid and are good for removing iron stain and watermarks from wood, but they don't actually lighten it much (if at all). 

Chlorine bleaches (as in domestic bleach) don't seem to do much to oak timber either.

I used Rustin's two part bleach. The two chemicals that are mixed in it are caustic soda and hydrogen peroxide - neither of them particularly friendly. If you use this stuff, read the advice on the label carefully and follow it! 

It certainly did lighten the wood nicely and didn't spread out too much either. If you'd like to try bleaching wood, there's some useful tips on the ukworkshop forum.

A few coats of Danish oil to complete it and the plaque was finished!

Making carved oak whisky bottles for the launch of 'Naked Grouse' whisky in the UK: Part One

In May this year a marketing company based in Glasgow, called Material, contacted me about a carving project.  I was recommended to them by Andy O'Neill, a chainsaw carver who is based in Bristol.

The company that make the well-known 'Famous Grouse' whisky were putting a new premium malt blend on general release in the UK, called 'Naked Grouse'. The marketing would highlight the craftsmanship involved in making the drink, which is where my woodcarving came in.

Image from:http://www.worldwhiskiesdesignawards.com/results/best-bottle.php

I was asked if I could make wooden replicas of the Naked Grouse bottle on plinths, to go on display as part of the promotion. The plinths would then be carved live in bars, with the logo of each establishment.

First of all, I took measurements and a profile from a sample bottle...

...then got on with turning six replica bottles using these measurements. The wood came from an oak tree that grew near Nether Stowey on the Quantock Hills in Somerset. Oak seemed a particularly appropriate timber to use, as the whisky is aged in oak casks. It was interesting to note, whilst turning, that the oak shavings had a particular smell that could also be noticed in the whisky.

It's been a while since I've done any woodturning and it was nice to get back to it, even though an electrical fault in the first lathe managed to short out the electrical circuits in my workshop! However, one new lathe later and the bottles started coming out nicely.

The turned bottles were then carved with the embossed grouse logo and the writing on the neck label. I used a Dremel hand drill for this part, as it could reproduce the fine lines that the designs required.

If you are wondering why the tops and bottoms of the bottles still had wood attached, it meant that I could work on them without handling the surfaces of the bottles too much and making them grubby, which can be a problem when working with oak (perhaps because of the tannins in it?).

Once the bottles had been carved, it was time to make the plinths. These were boxes constructed from offcuts of oak floorboards.

At the same time, I did colour tests to get the right blend of stains to match the colour of the oak bottles to the whisky. You may also be able to see that the level of liquid in the sample bottle has dropped by now-all in the sake of research of course!

It was back to school for the next bit. I stopped studying physics back then, but found that making the circuits for the LED lights was going to require some education online. Resistors, diodes, voltages: phew!

By this time, the bottles had been carved and I'd started to stain them.

I fitted the LED lights into the plinths using some short lengths of aluminium tubing, to give a neater uplight effect that showed off the grouse logo and the carved label nicely: 

After some adjusting of the height of the plinths, six bottle sculptures were nearly complete.

There was just the final, very important, part to be done. I needed to travel to London to carve the names of the bars on location!

And that will be in the next post...