A much improved carving attempt

Tonight was a good carving night.  I wanted to try the carving pattern on the 17th century box again, to see if I could improve my carving.  Normally these boxes are only carved on the front face of the box, but I am going to carve both sides just to get the practice.  I can tell that the practice helped from side one to side two, as my second attempt was so much better.

I learned a few tricks the first time I was able to apply the second time, and I came up with a couple new ideas and tools.  I also re-watched the Peter Follansbee carving video again.  I also had a better feel for the spacing of the “fans”, and found an old nail punch in a drawer that made a nice dot for the decoration.

As requested on the last post I took a lot more pictures along the line.

The first arcs laid out and penciled out for the camera.

The second set of arcs, done by eyeball

First set of arcs cut with the V tool.

Using the gouge to layout the rounded tops of the fan tail.

Sketched in the fan tail arc lines

Carved fan tail designs with punched decoration

Finished box side

Here is the source of the design inspiration again.  I keep a print out of it on my workbench to keep referring to, and looking at the carving over and over again.

The original box