Base

     My sable paint still had not arrived by this morning, so I decided to work on the base.  I chose the 14” round base I found at the wood sale last weekend in Sydney.  I sanded it with increasing grits - 120, 150, 220  - on the top and edges and cleaned off the sawdust.  Since my search for “marine blue” semi-transparent water-based stain was fruitless, I decided to instead use washes of manganese blue acrylic paint, repeating the washes until I got the right shade.  Wipe the paint on, let it soak in for 15-20 seconds, then wipe off the excess, wiping with the grain.  Acrylic washes dry very fast, and this method helps to avoid the darker parches that arise when wet paint is applied over partially dry paint.  Once the surface is wiped, I used the hair dryer to dry the recently applied coat thoroughly in preparation for the next coat.  The acrylic washes are semi-transparent, and the grain shows through.  Too many coats and the grain is hidden; too few coats and the color is not deep enough.  I finally got the right balance after four cycles.  The grain shows through enough to suggest currents, and the blue is deep enough to resemble ocean of lake water.  I considered the effort a success.

     I sealed the base with several coats of fast-drying water-based glossy polyurethane, sanding with 220-grit sandpaper in between coats.  The result, shown above, matches what I had in my head.  I thought for a while that I wanted an oval base, but this thick, heavy circular base will be much more stable.  The blue color, in addition to contributing to the illusion that the osprey is diving into water, is more or less a complementary color to the brownish tones of the osprey itself.

     How to mount the bird on the base?  The visually cool curved wire idea was abandoned quickly, because the 1/8” diameter steel wire was too bendy.  The straight 3/16” dowel idea similarly failed, because the weight of the carving bowed the dowel and I was afraid that the wood would snap.  My clear acrylic rod idea may not work either, because the acrylic rods, even 1/4”ones, are quite flexible, much more so that I expected.  The latest idea involves using a 3/16” diameter straight steel rod, which would surely be stiffer than both the 3/16” dowel and 3/16” acrylic rod.  A benefit of using a steel rod is that I can bend it a little at the point of exit from the bird’s belly, thereby making the diving angle steeper.  I want to do this so that the underside of the wing (which I will spend hours painting) will show better if the dive angle is steeper.  Bending the support rod a little to give a steeper angle is a safer choice than trying to drill another hole in the osprey’s belly at a different angle.  I will pick up a steel rod this afternoon from the local hardware store and try it out.  I won’t drill a hole in the base until I know what size dowel or rod I will use and what the diving angle is.  The dormer will determine the diameter of the hole and the latter will determine just where the hole will go, because I want the target point of the osprey’s dive to be close to the center of the base, if possible.

     This morning’s efforts took a couple of hours, pushing the total up to 118 hours.  In this total, I don’t include simply thinking about the carver, which I do on my walks and before falling asleep at night.  If I counted this time, the total would be in the hundreds and hundreds of hours!  I am documented only time spend physically working on the project.

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