Things have been moving along nicely in Shirehampton where I've been working with LinkAge and the Wild City Project, to create a bench that will be installed in a local nature reserve. The volunteers are a mix of older and younger people and everyone has been working hard to make the seat, which will hopefully be finished next week.
It will be carved to commemorate the horses and mules that were trained on the site to be sent to the battlefields of World War One.
The next day, Will came to my studio and we spent a great afternoon chatting about woodcarving. He's interested in possibly pursuing it as a career and so was keen to find out more about tools, techniques etc.
I haven't done a lot of one-to-one tuition at my studio as it is a real, working, vibrant, shared workshop and so can be a little noisy at times, although the folks sharing with me are very understanding about working around teaching sessions. However, the session with Will seemed to go very well indeed and so I'd like to do more of this kind of tuition in the future.
The great thing about one-on-one tuition is that it can be tailored more to the learner and what they want to do. They can also use my own personal tool set, so get to learn more about the differences between tool makes and shapes and what they can do with them. For example, Will is using a Ray Gonzalez hook skew below, a tool which is very delicate and so isn't always appropriate to include in a tool set for teaching a group. If you'd like to find out more about tuition, you can get my contact address via my website's contact page.
... and I'm looking forward to working with everyone again next week!
I've been twisting my neck around trying to get a clearer view of the carved horses on the photo from your group project. Did the students choose the theme? Somehow horses always seem to suit carved work.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to get a better picture next week when the horses are carved a bit more. It's true, horses do seem to suit don't they? I suppose they were such an important part of life when carving was also more commonly found. The students didn't pick the subject as there wasn't enough sessions to cover designing as well, although they were given the chance to draw out or write designs before carving them if they wanted to. They seemed to prefer the idea of me drawing the images though!
ReplyDelete