New Peach Pit Carving - Bee on Flower

I carved this one as a Christmas tree ornament. I didn't take photos with a camera that does good close-ups, so a series of much the same type of photo will have to do, with the hope that each shows a bit of variation. One can see two previous peach pit carving posts here and here.

I applied walnut stain selectively on different parts of the carving, rather than staining the whole thing, so as to bring out parts that I wanted brought out. I stained in between the petals of the flower, the center of the flower, and the "stripes" of the bee's abdomen, as well as the portions of the bee that are receded, to make them look more receded - so as to make the wings for instance look more like distinct wings. The stain in combination with carving the sections of the abdomen (if you look closely at a bee, the "stripes" are not due to colouring alone, but are also the result of sections protruding out of each other) looked quite sharp, but when I applied the finishing oil (just a clear "food grade" oil) on the peach pit, the sharpness was blurred. Maybe later it can be remedied.

It's all one peach pit. As with the others, nothing was glued on. The only time I'll glue is when putting two different peach pits together, which can be seen as such.




The backside:


Initially I wanted to carve the backside to look like the underside of a flower, but I feared taking too much away from the peach pit, so just carved it relatively smooth, but so one can still see it is a peach pit.