A Long Time Ago...

...in a galaxy far, far away, there was an alien fruit. Carved out of wood.

Here's how that happened:

We each got a chunk of wood, you had to cut it in half to make your halves to carve. Some people made a  cut widthwise, others cut lengthwise, but I cut it at an angle to make the most of my piece of wood. They weren't very wide across, maybe 8 inches. Then we had to drill and put in pegs for alignment.

I spent a long time, several weeks, carving out the inside with gouge tools. And then you have to use a scraper and scrape and scrape til your sides are smooth. And then you sand, sand, sand your heart out. It's kindof amazing that wood can become that smooth.

Then it came time to address the outside. I cut it out using the bandsaw, leaving the "fringe" to stick out on the one side. And then I carved, carved, carved the outside away. There was a lot of carving involved to round the edges. And you had to be careful not to go too deep for fear of carving into your interior hollow. I purposely made my carving marks radiate out from the middle to be intentional. I liked the carved marks and kept them instead of smoothing them out.

Next came time to pick a finish. I mixed up milk paint in several shades of blue and a contrasting peachy orange color. Since milk paint is comprised of more natural elements, it doesn't come in very bright colors. It does adhere to wood nicely. I also mixed some of the blue with the peach to make a purple-y color for shading.

The light color on there is paste wax residue that dried and I couldn't buff very well since it was down in the crevices. It didn't bother me too much- since when is nature neat?

I like the contrast of rough and smooth places:

The underside:

I kept the bottom dowel so it could pivot open, but removed the side one and filled in the hole with wood putty. Some kept theirs open, others glued them shut so that you could only see the interior through an opening.

I wasn't very motivated for this assignment. I found that I liked carving with wood, but I didn't care about making an alien fruit. I do like my fruit better then I thought I would, but I basically came up with a shape that I knew my teacher would like. She does this assignment year after year and I have seen several semester's worth in the display case and was never excited to make one of my own. It was a pretty boring, painful critique to have to sit through, though my fruit fared well.

The really lame part of this project was that you had to write a page about your fruit and make up it's functions, etc and also make up where this fruit came from. I came up with some hairbrained story at 1 am simply to fulfill the assignment. Having to make up stuff just seemed really juvenile, very grade school. It was also lame to have to read your story and have to listen to other students read their stories that you knew they made up last minute, too. 

Also, what do you do when classmates have really immature pieces? One girl did a mutated mushroom that came from a planet where you ate things and (and I quote) "they expand your mind." One boy did a fruit that was very obviously inspired by male genitalia and had a perverted "planet" story as well. No one took them seriously, everyone just laughed. This boy is in the art ed program, I'm kindof doubting his future teaching abilities. I'm not going to be the Censorship Police, but it was all very immature high school and I found it to be pretty lame.

I like carving- I want to carve a carousel horse now! It's not too different then this project, all you have to do is laminate a bunch of wood together in a rough horse shape, and then hack, hack away til you get a horse!

The rest of the semester will be spent constructing a table of my design, I'm excited about that.