Wednesday, December 29, 2010

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.


11 comments:

Anonymous said...

uhmm...wow?

Bryan

Terry Nelson said...

Beautiful Paul!

Paul Stilwell said...

Bryan and Terry, thank you. There's a few ideas for other peach pit carvings swimming around. A turtle, a frog and a butterfly.

M.A. Omri Flores Sánchez said...

New works of art done hand made of bone peach.
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/Oflores.Omri

Itinérante said...

Did you end up doing the turtle?

Paul Stilwell said...

Funny you should mention the turtle. I haven't done it yet, but in carving a rose around Christmas time this last year I found by accident how to go about doing it - a sea turtle. The thought of how to do the flippers had always presented a challenge to me, thus not having started a sea turtle, but I stumbled upon a solution! Of course, now all I need to do is start carving it. :)

Itinérante said...

That is funny! A rose sounds like a nice thing to do, fancy even, but I really love turtles and tortoises and all this specie so much ^^
Is it peach season?
It is cherry season here now... Have you tried carving on these?
One time I did a rosary out of olive ones. It was not really carving, you kind of just sand the edges of the pit and it becomes a bead :) not as awesome as you carving but somewhere on the road of creativity ^^

Paul Stilwell said...

Oh no, peach season is still a ways yet here. The Okanagan usually has them ripening around August into September. It's almost cherry season here though. I figure about two more weeks and they'll be ready! Alas, no, I haven't tried carving cherry pits. They're just not big enough, and I couldn't be bothered with doing micro incisions with special instrument a pair of magnifying lenses.

Now making a rosary out any kind of fruit stone or pit is awesome. What did you use for the linkage?

Itinérante said...

It is pretty and feels a lot like Benedictine for some reason! I used regular chords the one that are made out of three thinner ones joined together like in a spiral... What do you call these?

Paul Stilwell said...

Sounds like a good sturdy and beautiful rosary!

Paul Stilwell said...

I'm not sure what one would call that kind of cord.