Whilst on a roll, I have continued a bit of letter carving practice, trying out some different fonts to add to my repertoire. Here is some Gothic/Old English/Blackletter - choose your descriptor. This is in some poplar that I split from a green log a while back and it has air dried. Much easier to carve than the she-oak and holds detail quite nicely. Very soft though and it crushes easily if your tools are not sharp. I did the capital M first and you can see there's quite a few dents in the walls of the uprights and the junctions aren't very clean. The A and B were done second and they look better but still more faceting on the junctions than I would like

This font has been enjoyable practice - the Capitals are ridiculously ornate and the miniscules are lots of straight sections joined together, so lots of junctions. Chris promises that this sort of work helps improve other types of carving and I can see how that could be true - letter carving seems to be about doing basic repetitive cuts but with attention to detail so that it looks crisp. Also added is a tudor rose that I did in the same material, much earlier and the junctions are, by comparison, very untidy.
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