Beginning bone / antler carving. 01 : Materials and introduction.

I'd like to first walking me to my channel it might be a bit noisy because I'm currently sitting out my balcony where I've set up my beautiful weather workplace and I imagine that if you're watching this video you have some interesting carving or you'd like to get started carving so let's get started at the beginning in front of you you're gonna see quite a big mess and let me take some things away so let's take this away let's take this away let's take this away this and this let's move this and let's get down to the basics two of the most commonly used materials especially by beginners are going to be we have antler on the left side and this is a cow bone on the right side and first I would recommend that if you want to get into carving and you wants to do it especially cheaply by a bunch of cow bone go to the grocery store you know these ones are précised for I think these are for getting marrow outs and also for using in different stews or soups or what-have-you and one of the best properties of bone is that it's cheap and it takes extremely fine details and it's quite easy to work you can work it with a lot of different tools you can work it with hardened steel this carbon steel high speed steel basically anything will cut even I mean even something as soft is for example stainless steel although you don't really want to get into stainless steel tools one of the unique properties of bone is that it grows lengthwise and you can actually see this this is one of the good things one of the bad things about bone is that when you when you have this kind of a piece of material here you can see that if you want to get flat pieces you're going to have to split this or cut this and normally I use a hacksaw to cut it into these lengthwise sections so let's go ahead and take a look at this piece right here this is a piece that would be perfect you're using four bracelet or four pendants and get quite a lot of items out of this one and this is also one of the benefits of bone as well as that it's beautiful material especially if you know how to brighten it up or you can even diets into different colors or what have you and I think the first thing I carved was probably a beef bone and I'll post a video of that a bit later or at least a photo of it a bit later and it's just well I was completely amazed that such an inexpensive material could take such a beautiful polish and had such a wonderful translucency about it and yeah I can show you one of the types of tools I used originally I'll also post some videos of this on my blog some up-close photos as well so this is made from just a dowel of wood and a high speed steel drill bit and with this one tool move it or not you can make just about anything I mean even something for example as complicated as this skull and even for example something like this that I'm carving out of mammoth ivory it's quite incredible what you can do with one little tool and so let's take a look at the other well I will say cheap but you know you if you get a quite nice piece of antler you can run me about twenty thirty dollars maybe even more let's talk about the area of the antler we have here a we have the long sections here there are actually technical terms for all of these but I don't know them so you have the long section here and actually if you've gonna go ahead and take a look at this cross section you're gonna see a very porous dark middle and this is called the pith and this is a equivalent to for example the marrow and a normal bone so the and the antlers actually attempted bone itself and the difference between antler and for example beef bone is that antler is quite a lot softer and they really our is a very delicate touch to be able to get fine details and even then it's usually best to use a rotary tool of some some sort in a very nice sharp bit and with a very gentle a lot of pressure you're able to get some quite amazing details but it does take a quite a lot more skill to use than bone or at least to get started anyway and the best part of the antler is has quite a few names depending on who you ask but this is called the burr or the rosette or the crown of the antler and this is really some of the most prime material if you go online and you google search antler carving if you see some super detailed beautiful work a lot of times this is made from the crown of the antler and in terms of density it's it's really up there with the ivory mammoth ivory and I would guess to say it is at least as dense as bone maybe even more dense and it's a wonderful material to work with and growing up I saw quite a lot of OMA chola belt buckles carved out of it with stag motifs boars pheasants what-have-you okay let's move on a bit here we have also another piece of antler and this one is it's quite unique I'm not really sure to be honest what deers these come off of but this is an extremely solid burr and it's extremely thick so you can see here that there is some of the pith right there but basically this is one solid nugget of you can even call it amber I mean antler ivory and it's such a wonderful material and I bought this about five six years ago and I will definitely have to post a link to this guy's eBay stores I don't know how they get them but the price is really really great and for our tutorials we're mostly going to be going with a bone because it's probably one of the materials that's easily accessible to people in most countries let's take a look at some other materials here so we have here two pieces of mammoth ivory and mammoth ivory is great I don't use personally any kind of elephant ivory I find an idea to kill the whole animal for the for the ivory itself just to be a bit silly and Liat to say the least and mam with the ivory is quite amazing material you can get all the details you can in elephant ivory without how a whole elephant having to die and I know some Carver's have ever hold of the antique elephant ivory but still needs a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth and so the good thing is that you can get beautiful details you can make amazing works with the mammoth ivory the downside is is this very expensive material especially for a beginner carver to work with and this is something I wouldn't recommend this is I would say that once you start getting to the advanced level to go ahead and grab a small piece of mammoth ivory and go to it and I will also make a separate video about mammoth ivory and what to look for where to look for it it is possible to get a reasonable price but it's especially nowadays quite a lot of it goes directly to China from the fields in Siberia so trying to find it is very difficult the best chance you can have is a Alaskan mammoth ivory and even then I from what I understand it's getting quite difficult to get ahold of it let's move on to you some other material here we have here a piece of antler that's coming from a young deer or stag and you can see it's completely solid all the way through these make fantastic beads they're very dense and I'm going to as you can see here there's quite different colors here and I think this is these are left over by the presence of the blood that's inside of these and I'm going to make another video later on how to remove this color oh let's see what else do we have here we have a piece of sacrificial cocobolo wood I believe this is cocobolo and this isn't a fantastic material to carve in this is I say it's at least up there in terms with hardness with ebony and it just has amazing let's see if I can put a bit of oil on that so you can see some of the chatoyancy this is a cat-like effect so this is really incredible it's almost something like tiger's eye and I don't buy cocobolo or a bowl of this Ebola I don't buy a cocobolo or Eponine from any kind of wood shops because I find the prices now to be ridiculous so what I tend to do is find you know a badly carved pieces that are coming these are just mass-produced in for example different parts of Africa Latin America and find them at the flea market chop them right up and sacrifice them let's take a look here and what I want to do is to show you the material that we're also going to be using for quite a lot of our tutorials let's see this is fantastic material and I really hope the sunlight does it justice so first up is these come from a company called Aurora opals and this is company based in Germany and I think the opals are made in Japan so look at this this is absolutely fantastic this looks like the highest quality black opal it is really incredible I don't even think the Sun can do it justice and the molds that you can see here it's kind of a tub or something that it's a grown assembled in so you can see here that this is actually probably a quarter of a tub and what it does is actually grows in layers so if you see here there's a deposition of the solid colors here that which is also incredible but actually the more interesting part to me is that when you when it's been cut this way you can actually see now there's a huge play of colors so you don't get these solid colors anymore and yeah it's really fantastic material in terms of Mohs hardness I'll go ahead and put a put a scale in the description in terms of Mohs hardness this is a about a four I would say something from a three to a four so this is a really forgiving material this is something in terms of hardness between mm amber or something like amber or whale teeth or it's really it's hard enough to take a super fine detail and it's soft enough to work without having to have any special diamond tools or you don't even really have to wet grind this although I would recommend that if you're not going to wet grind this that you at least have some kind of good dust mask and this is we're going to go over this in another video you want to and I'm also going to show people how to build a cyclone dust extractor to protect your lungs and of course another video we're going to go over the safety issues but yeah protect your lungs protect your eyes and your fingers because I don't think you can get any replacements so let's uh this has a very unusual bubble pattern but actually it's very it looks 3d but it's actually on the surface so this is the aura the the orange Aurora opal let's move on to the green Aurora opal it's just really fantastic material and one of the benefits of this is that you don't have to have a diamond saw compared to traditional opal you don't have to worry about this cracking on you with traditional opal if we had a piece of this large you know leave it out in the warm weather or even gosh just up on your bookshelf and you I can guarantee you that you come back and in a few months you're gonna have all this crazy and going through the opal so this is really fantastic and my favorite material is this is the new transparent material so as you can see it looks a bit something like opal light if you look right through it that's a type of opal looking glass it's glass no matter what they say this is actually such incredible material that when you put an opaque backing on it it just the color leaps out at you it's really incredible an I'm going to show you some special techniques with this later and it's quite unusual because I expected the or the orange aurora opal to be my favorite piece and it is beautiful but some of the things I found that I've been able to do with this transparent material is incredible and I'll go over that a bit later so yeah we're going to be using these to get into these are kind of a transition like a halfway point between organic material and so for example this is somewhere between amber like carving amber ER and mmm we can say this is for example transition material so once you're going to get comfortable with as a good example with the mammoth ivory then you can go to this material and this material in terms of price it's really really I would say fairly priced for the amount of work that has to go into it so these are made something like a natural opals that you have different size spheres of silica refracting the light and creating these beautiful colors and from what I understand the process is the there's a base material and then they have the silica spheres in it and they stay rest and they kind of maybe mix them up a little bit to create this rolling effect but a regardless it's so beautiful material and you can cut this directly with a any kind of steel saw for example like hacksaw but of course you want to be very careful with it and it's really has a huge amount of of abilities that I would say it's extremely versatile for inlay or for what-have-you let's look a bit at some other gemstone material so we're gonna be making a video entirely on how to work this but uh I would say is one of the great advantage of this is that you can work it with steel tools you can work with carbide you don't even have to bust out your diamonds for this so let's move that aside and we can take a look for a few minutes I'll get into these a bit later and that in the tools video but I want to take a look at we have here something that everybody's seen you have here these diamond burrs that you want to use for gemstone carving we have here a carbide bird as well I'll be able to get some close-up shots of these later and we have just a typical sanding drums and so the first video that I'm going to make it's going to be about materials and I've tried to go over quite a lot of details with with this first video the second material is going to be a second video is going to be about it's gonna be about primarily tools and how to make your very first tools and how to get away with it quite cheaply because this is one of the things that you're going to be able to do you can see can start carving basically for free I started with a nail a small torch and I think I might've even used my gas burner for it and just a piece of beef bone and off I went and that was about eight years ago so now I'm able to carve things like this skull here is quite small and highly detailed and this is what I'm working on currently in the mammoth ivory I have a few more that I'll show so so thank you for watching the video and subscribe and hit like if you like it hit dislike if you liked it as long as you watch the video good enough for me

Channel: The Art of Creating

Views: 15,184

Rating: 4.8289475 out of 5

Keywords: carving, antler, bone carving, antler carving, how to carve, gem carving, tutorial

Id: _MUkDChaBAk

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 12 2018