Sidetracked
My favorite way to learn is by seeing and doing. It’s always been that way, for me, and it’s not changing anytime soon. I’ve mentioned wanting to find a space, a room, and to be able to make a mess. And while I still long for it, until my Fall travel schedule calms down a bit, there’s just no point in making it so.
Thus, a corner of the apartment will do in a pinch, and a surface and the lifetime of supplies I’ve amassed are all I need to get going on projects. Also, momentum. And confidence. Those things are harder to come by but more fulfilling to harness.
Anyway, as I’ve been in early stages of projects, I’m looking for the ‘seeing’ part of that learning process before the ‘doing.’ A trip to Metalliferous for some missing supplies and the book I thought I needed for adequate learning sent me home with assurance that while books are helpful, they’re not necessary. Home, with a million ideas and a block of untouched wax staring up at me from my table, I began looking for videos to gather a few tips on carving technique.
What I found was actually not as much as I’d have guessed would be available online. There are a fair number of tutorials out there, but they’re a bit vague and incomplete. I know that in the process of creation, there are always however many different routes to the same end, it’s simply a matter of preference, and in that a matter of experimentation. There are some wax carving videos that are quite lengthy and helpful:
Some that are ridiculously bad, almost to the point of being funny:
And then of course, there are the strange things one finds when one doesn’t mean to. For instance, did you know how they gave anatomical sculptures found in medical oddity museums that lifelike texture, with pores and hair? This one tells you, though I must warn it’s all a bit creepy:
And fruit carving gets a whole plethora of meditative, peaceful instructional videos that make we want to break out a melon or mango stat:
Do you have any sources you go to for instruction when you need it? Do you get as easily sidetracked as I do by the irrelevant things you find?
Until next time,
Aurora
