Recently my wife found three 12” diameter teak
platters at her favorite thrift store and bought them for me. She
knows that I prefer to carve on stuff that is already turned rather
than having to turn it myself.
She asked me to carve a fairy on one of the platters
just for her. So that was my first project of the three. I looked on the
internet for a pattern and found one that would work. There were a lot
of fairy pictures but only a few would lend themselves to a carving.
Here is a picture of the platter I used for this
project, as found in the thrift store. I believe that it had been used
for serving and carving meat. I scraped and sanded out all the
imperfections.
Then I glued my pattern onto the
platter so I could woodburn through it and have my pattern on the
wood.
Now the actual carving begins.
First I had to rough out the background and
give some shape to the figure. Then I was ready to start on the
wings.
The wings were primarily an exercise in
wild colors. I used several different types of colors, ink dyes, paint,
colored pencils, and analine dyes.
James D. Thompson
October, 2009
