7 Attachment(s)
Some flowers for the fair
Well, actually for an art show.
Work is putting on a staff art show for the start of term (tomorrow), so I have made some flowers to display at it.
Not having made flowers before I was a bit worried, so gave myself a very generous (:no:) two weeks to make three flowers in. Actually, I made four, but the second one I made is ugly and coarse not up to the standard of the others, so I ditched it (after 4 days!) and changed plans accordingly.
The theme I was loosely working around was flowering/unfurling. Each flower was going to be in a different stage of openness and maturity. They weren't meant to be three stages in the same flower.
Technique-wise, I used it as an opportunity to practise some off-axis turning. The stem of one was turned using a PSI off-centre chuck, and the stems of the other two were turned by angling the wood in the jaws of the chuck (35mm spigot jaws, so they still got a decent grip). One of the flowers is based around an end-grain hollow form and one around a side-grain bowl. I also used it as an opportunity on two of the flowers to play about with a blowtorch and pryrography iron.
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To give an idea of scale, the open flower on the right is just over 25 1/2 cm tall.
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The just opening flower is made from blackwood with burnt-in accents on the inner part. The pistil is made from tassie oak. The stem is silky oak.
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The little flower I made to replace the disaster. It is smaller than the pistil alone of the rejected one! It is 9cm high, with the petals 3cm wide. The petals are just on 1mm thick. The stem is made from weathered river redgum, the petals from oak (Quercus sp.) and the pistil from forest redgum.
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The mature, open flower is made from silky oak for the large petals and river redgum for the smaller petals. The pistil is based on a magnolia spike and was made from blackwood which was turned then attacked with a dremel tool, burnt with a blowtorch then burnished with some woodshavings. The stem and base is from a piece of spalted silver birch.
All were finished to 400 grit then given multiple coats of shellac.
Thanks for looking,
Cheers, Mike
