Base

    Well, for the last few days I have struggled to create a base that meets my expectations and those of possible viewers.  Didn't I already make a base, you ask?  I did, but when I tentatively shared images of my carving with some of my virtual buddies on the Animal and Bird Carving Forum, one of the first comments (by a very experienced carver) was about the absence of a target for the osprey's dive.  I had assumed that the reason for the dive was obvious, and therefore only provided a base with a "marine blue" surface.  My carving friend felt that for artistic purposes and to complete the piece, the osprey should be going after something.

    He was right, of course, and I had felt the same way, so I set to work on a new base.  I wanted to keep the round one around as a backup, in case any new attempts were failures, so I got some new wood and got to work.  I researched some photos of fish from above, swimming just below the surface, and sketched out a generic fish outline with pectoral and ventral fins and a swirly tail.  I tried woodburning the outline into a piece of wood, but that looked cartoony.  I tried doing a shallow relief carving on a different piece of wood, but since I had never carved a fish before and haven't done too much relief carving, that didn't work out too well.  I was about to give up and stick with the round base, when I found an image of a zen-like, abstract carving of a tabletop with a fish's back and some ripples, as if the fish were swimming just below the surface but generating a wake behind him.  That was just the effect I was looking for - abstract, containing ripples to simulate water, and providing the viewer with a sense that the osprey was diving after something we couldn't see.

    The abstract fish shape and the ripple pattern got me thinking more about the shape of the base itself, and after some thought I decided to make the base an oval.  The round base was somewhat static, whereas an oval base with ripples would reinforce the forward and downward movement of the bird.

    I found a clear, knot-free section of a 2"x12" board I had lying around in the garage and drew an oval shape on it that was 8" by 12", using the old push-pins-and-string method.  This is somewhat smaller than the round blue base, which is 13" in diameter.  I cut out the oval with my saber saw (since I don't have a scroll saw), smoothed the sawn edges with my edge sander ( a small one meant for ship model parts, not 1.5" thick wood!), and drilled a 3/16" hole for the support rod.

    I sketched out an appropriately-sized tear-drop shape representing the fish's body and drew some ripples around it to suggest motion.  The ripples would be closer together and a little higher nearer the "head", and wider and shallower as they moved away from the unseen fish in a V-shaped pattern.  I took a deep breath, and starting defining the fish shape and ripples with various carving bits.  I was helped a little bit by the grain pattern in the area of the fish's head. When I got the effect I was looking far, I sanded the surface with increasing grits, from 60 to 100 to 150 to 220, until I got it as smooth as I could, although I couldn't completely remove the carving marks from the dips in between the ripples or eliminate the dips caused by the different densities of the wood grain.

    The next decision was to stain or not to stain, to paint or not to paint.  I liked the blue of the round base, and decided to stick with that. Since the wood for this new base was different from that of the round base, I used a sample piece from the same 2"x10" board with eight defined square areas to check the marine blue color on this wood and the effect of multiple color washes on the color intensity.  The squares were in two rows of four.   The top row had squares with one, two, three and four coats of blue wash but were not sealed.  The bottom row had four squares with the same pattern of multiple coats of color but had polyurethane applied to them after the paint was dry.  The poly darkened the color somewhat, as I had noticed when I was finishing the round base, but I wanted to be sure what I would get with kiln-dried white pine.  The application of the sealer somehow brought out a little of the yellowish color of the pine and produced subtle blue-green color variations within the grain pattern of the wood.  I like how it looked, so I proceeded this morning to add four coats of marine blue wash to the oval base, drying between each coat, followed by two coats of glossy polyurethane.

    The result is shown below, with the base by itself and with the carving mounted on it.  I will give myself a B+.  I may make yet another one before I enter the carving in the October Spirit of Wood Show, but this one would probably be good enough for competition.  At least the bird has a visible target, and a moving one at that!

    Now, I can finally get my brain to focus back on finishing up the paint job on the osprey itself!

    I won't count the wasted hours spent over the last two days trying this and that approach to putting a fish  target on a base, but this morning's washes and finishing took about two hours, for a total of 135 productive hours spent on this carving project.