You can read the rest of this series here.

This was week four of Wood & Stone Sculpture — I’m halfway through the class now, and things appear to be coming together nicely, as you can see in the video above.

I started by beautifying the teeth I had sketched around the edge of my sculpture, making them a little straighter, more even, and more tapered. I predicted at the beginning of the video that I’d be doing a lot of chiseling, but I actually spent more time filing. The big chunks of stone you can see in the photo below were removed with a little help from the instructor Nick, and a power saw:

After cutting some guide lines (I missed photographing this step), all it took was a few taps of the hammer to drop the bulk of the remaining stone.

I did do a small amount of chiseling to knock off the roughest edges. But mostly I focused on making the lines straight. Some of you might remember from my drawing class last year that I had a little bit of trouble with straight lines, so naturally, I chose a design that requires lots of them.

Nick did give me one important tip, though, which was to file the very edge of each tooth to the edge of the lines I had drawn, before filing the rest of the tooth to that same point. Hopefully this keeps the lines pretty straight.

I’m not exactly sure what comes next, but I do need to make some more design choices soon, including about that hole through the center. You can see in the video and that first photo that the stone has some interesting marbling on one face, so that will probably factor into whatever decision I make. But I am finding it much easier to visualize the finished piece, I just have to decide exactly what I’m going for.

— George