It's taken a bit of an age to write this but my artistic journey has moved into second gear recently so I felt I should make a concerted effort to get my blogs up to date.
'Surely it's too fluffy' was my first thought when, armed with chisels, riffler files and sand paper, I picked up a piece of MDF. I'd already exhausted the usable pieces of hardwood at my disposal for carving in the round. What I had available was still too green to start working on. I found a chunky piece of unidentified wood in my garage which was too thin to carve anything in the round from. So, having had a love of animation for many years, I decided to see if I could do a relief carving of Goofy instead. It turned out that the lump of wood was a softwood so the grain was just crushed under the thrust of my chisels.
Undeterred, I found a piece of MDF - an offcut from one of the many shelves I made for our home. I found a fairly simple picture of the Goof and set to work. I think the MDF was only 12mm thick. Being new to the whole relief carving concept I didn't go very deep. Indeed, the carving is not much more than 1mm thick which, as it turns out, limits your ability to get layers into the work and provide good perspective.
At this point I had also decided to carve the frame or, at least, have the frame as a part of the work. There's no detail on some of the other frames but they are still part of the piece of MDF that the character is carved from.
I also realised that I could start painting this work because there was no grain to hide. This really appealed to the (generally poor) painter in me and satiated my love of colour - the brighter and bolder the better!
In case you're wondering, Goofy was leaning against a lamppost in the picture I used, hence his strange and rather gravity defying stance!
So, it could be done. With lots of patience, very sharp tools and a delicate touch it was possible to carve MDF. I needed to be more brave with my depth of cut and I had to get my head around layers. Goofy was very flat with his nose being carved at the same level as his cheek and the rest of him. There will always be some degree of this in relief carvings but, even if there's only a millimetre or two difference it helps with the aforementioned perspective.
My next effort was dramatically better despite only venturing an extra couple of mil into the board. I got hold of some 15mm MDF and set to work on Mickey Mouse. Even I was amazed at how well this came out. The image below is actually a plaster version because I toyed with the idea of making a mould of the carving and creating lots of plaster versions to present to Disney as a possible 'paint your own' product. My thanks go to Nigel Knell, a good friend from my Army days who, at that time, ran one of the only bronze casting foundry's in the country. He facilitated this mad idea, he helped me to make the mould and he supplied me with plaster to get me going.
I guess if that process had been industrialised it might have worked. But, it wasn't entirely straight forward and it wasn't carving so I lost interest in the idea after a while. Still, this one went to my young Niece for a Birthday as it was one of the few successful pours. I'm not sure about the colour combo now but that can be changed if so desired.
This was the last time I carved a pattern into the frame.
From Mickey I moved onto a fabulous picture of Whinnie the Pooh and Tigger. I loved this picture and I loved carving it. I got a bit braver again with this piece and ventured down to 5mm. There weren't so many layers in this image to worry about but the depth certainly added to the overall effect.
One of the biggest challenges on this piece was the painting. It required some very careful and delicate brush work which I thoroughly enjoyed. The need to exercise a variety of disciplines to bring the work to fruition made this form of carving very satisfying to me.
As you can see I left the frame nice and plain this time. The seamless effect appeals to my sense of aesthetic and it's something I've carried over to the frames I make for my newer relief carvings.
I need to do a bit of touching up on this picture now. As I'm unable to sell them - due to copyright - they've followed me around for the past twenty odd years. I plan to get them all sorted and donate them to the Bristol Childrens Hospital at some point.
Following on from Whinnie came two more cartoon characters. The first was Pluto in a really challenging piece. Not only did I have to get the layers of Pluto correct, I also had to get the picture frame angled and make the torn canvas look right in relation to his body.
I went deeper again with this carving. I had to! In order to get the right perspective I ventured down to a depth of 7 or 8mm. I also carved the tail on this piece whereas I just painted the tail on the Mickey Mouse picture. The frame has been stained to provide some good contrast against the background which I intentionally left untouched. I felt that the buff colour of the MDF was a great back drop for the bright colours of the carving.
And finally, on my cartoon character journey, came Taz. I found this tiny little image on a T-shirt, blew it up on a photocopier and created this....
It's difficult to see in 2D, but, this picture had 7 layers to incorporate into the 9mm depth of the carving. From his nose the different layers were ... the face behind the nose (the snout!), the cheeks, the border of the eyes, the eyes, the headband and the hair behind the headband! Another challenge with carving MDF is the pointy bits. The paint helps to stabilise these but you have to be very careful whilst carving not to knock them.
And that was that! I finished Taz in April 1998 and didn't carve MDF again until my 'Random 01' piece in 2013. In the interim my life followed a winding and sometimes torrid path which involved a move from Hampshire to Somerset and from employment to self-employment. The next chapter on my artistic journey involved a trip to Portland Island where I spent an absolutely magical week with PSQT (Portland Sculpture & Quarry Trust) learning to carve stone in Tout Quarry. That's for the next post.