Wood Carving

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1903 edition. Excerpt: ...merit of "never having been seen before." It has evidently taken its inspiration from the trailing and supine forms Originality of floating seaweed, and revels in the expression of such boneless structure. By way of variety it presents us with a kind of symbolic tree, remarkable for more than archaic flatness and rigidity. Now, this kind of "originality" is not only absolutely valueless, but exceedingly harmful; its only merit is that, like its ideal seaweed, it has no backbone of its own, and we may hope that it will soon betake itself to its natural home, the slimy bottom of the ocean of oblivion. Meantime, the only thing we are absolutely sure of in connection with that much-abused word "originality" is this, that no gift, original or otherwise, can be developed without steady and continuous practise with the tools of your craft. CHAPTER XIII PIERCED PATTERNS Exercise in Background Pattern--Care as to Stability--Drilling and Sawing out the Spaces--Some Uses for Pierced Patterns. Pierced The present exercises may be described as Patterns a kind of carved open fretwork--that is to say, the ground is entirely cut away, leaving the pattern standing free. This will form an excellent piece of discipline with regard to the design of background forms, because in such work as this, those forms assert themselves in a very marked manner; if they are in any way found to be con Pierced Patterns spicuously unequal in size or are awkwardly designed as to shape, the whole effect of the work is spoiled. For your first effort make a design based upon No. 24, and please to observe these rules in its construction. The main or leading lines of the pattern are to run as much as possible without crossing each other. The holes...