Dave Stetson tells about his encounters with Santa

all right guys thank you all again for joining us today with the international association of wood carvers uh today is october the 23rd uh about five after three on saturday afternoon and we appreciate you taking time out to join us today we hope everybody's had a good summer we've uh taken a little bit of time off from these live meetings uh but we're gonna start getting geared back up and uh have pretty good schedule lined up for you through the end of the year so i'll talk a little bit about that towards the end of the meeting today i just want to cover a few things that we have going on to start off we're going to do a live auction again in today's meeting so we've partnered with healthy knives they've been generous enough to donate another carving knife that's available for auction tom and i have recently received international association woodcarver's richardson hats so we're going to kick that in as well as part of the auction so if you want to participate in the auction uh the money will go towards this international association of woodcarvers group uh basically we're still paying for the subscription for zoom uh we're trying to do giveaways and things like that so all the proceeds go back to the meetings it's not anything that tom and i um take any advantage of or use anything as far as personal for us it's more just to keep these meetings going so we're going to go ahead and open the chat for that if you want to bid on that again it's the healthy knife and the hat it'll be a combo package the highest bender at the end of the meeting will receive both of those things if you win we'll need you to stay on at the end of the meeting so we can get your information we accept payment through paypal so if you're willing to bid on that we'll get your paypal information at the end of the meeting and set up all that information as we finish the meeting so again it's a healthy knife and a hat if you want to bid on that make sure you put it in the chat throughout the meeting and we'll finish that up towards the end i'll make an announcement at the end let you all know when we're getting ready to close that out um want to let you know what we've been doing a little bit uh since we haven't been doing live meetings uh tom and i have started a podcast we're doing the carving podcast uh we're doing that sporadically so there's no set schedule as far as the carving podcast uh but we've we've got uh i think seven episodes out there uh dave levy that's on here has been doing our audio so he's our our audio guy go out and check out the carving podcast if you get a chance it's out on amazon music you can find it on spotify and on podbean uh we're working now to try to get it on apple music so uh you should be able to find that anywhere that you can hear podcasts in the near future i wanted to let you know also that there's another carving podcast out there if you're interested in listening to podcasts a lot of people like to go and listen to those uh as they're driving to work and things uh check out carving and coffee show uh that's with alec lacasse and doug linker i think doug's on with us today we've had alec on with us in the past uh pretty entertaining uh conversations between the two of them they don't do interviews like we do but i think they have nine or ten out there you can hear those the same places or you can go out on youtube and find those so make sure you check out their podcast as well we want to thank some of the supporters that we have that help us with these meetings again healthy knives is one you'll see the banner here chipping away we get some donations from them that we do giveaways for if you're looking for carving supplies make sure you check them out make sure you check out uh wood carving illustrated and chip chats they've both been generous to do advertisements for us for these meetings and their magazines so make sure you go out and you subscribe to those two groups again chip chats they were on with us a while back also they have a new website that they've set up so you can check them out at chipchats.org and then one other make sure you're going out and looking at wood carving academy you can do a subscription there of i think a month three months or a whole year and you can go out and check out the past workshops that they've done uh videos of those so if there's past classes and stuff that maybe you wanted to sign up for but you weren't able to they may be out on wood carving academy so make sure you check them out and they also advertise upcoming workshops that's coming up so you can use that website to go to to find out workshops that you might be able to participate in today on our meeting we've got dave stetson with us uh he's the co-founder of the cca coming to us from scottsdale arizona uh he's got a workshop that's coming up um on a wood carving santa uh it starts november 6 and i know dave's going to talk a little bit about that if you're interested in signing up for that class you'll need to reach out to dave and make sure you get all the details early so that you can get one of the the rough outs that he'll use for the class so make sure you check out check out that opportunity and again dave will be talking about that some of the other workshops that's coming up um kevin applegate is going to be doing a santa ornament workshop on december the 4th janet cordell is going to be doing a workshop on a realistic wolf that's going to start on december the 6th and i feel certain that there'll be other workshops out there that you'll be able to participate in we'll be talking about those in the coming weeks so i just want to bring all those things to your attention i'm going to go ahead and turn it over to dave stetson dave's been a big supporter of our group uh he's done two presentations and he's also been on one of the podcasts uh we're happy to have dave on today he's going to talk a little bit about santa carving i know everybody's kind of geared up for christmas ornaments and things like that but dave's going to talk to us about his approach to santa carving uh talk about his workshop that's coming up and kind of the things that he looks for in a good santa carving and uh give us some points and tips so dave we appreciate you coming on today uh we're always happy to have you and we look forward to hearing from you and again at the end i'll talk to you a little bit about what's coming up as far as this group goes in the upcoming meeting so thank you all for joining us and i'll go ahead and turn it over to dave stetson thank you blake absolutely good morning or afternoon whichever the case may be all of you um glad to see everybody on here that although i don't see anybody but anyway uh we're going to talk about santa's um something i've been carving for about 40 years so um where i got my inspiration where it started uh and what i've done with it this is appropriate time of year for it um before michelle had her stroke uh making me now a caregiver rather than a wood carver primarily um she and i would this time of year be sitting out here in the shop carving santa's side by side and uh carving painting probably 16 18 hours a day getting as many of them out as we could um because it was a primary source of income for us um learned that it was more profitable to teach others how to carve their own santas than to carve santa's for them but uh in teaching you learn where people are learning a lot of bad habits and where they're getting bad ideas and uh you try to adjust those with the carvers but as soon as they leave you and go to somebody else they're learning bad stuff all over again and that's not to say that i'm the only one that knows how to to show somebody the right way to do something but uh people have to learn for themselves what works for them and they have to more importantly learn what they like and i'll show you what i like and what i don't like so if we can take the camera off of me and put it on some of the santas i've drug out here this is just a couple of handfuls of over 800 that we have in our collection and uh i've tried to gather up some different styles and different types and that's what we'll talk about um this little guy down here in the corner is one that i'm going to be this is the one i'm going to be teaching on november 6th so if you're interested in that um shoot me an email that's to lcn michelle aol.com and i will send you an email that gives you all the pertinent information on how to sign up for it we'll talk about this guy a little bit later but all these other carvings that you see on the table here are what have led up to this one that and 40 years of making mistakes and screwing up so we'll get right into uh some of the basic things that we started with which were carved from sticks and this you can see was in fact a two two by two about seven inches tall and we put a fireman's hat on him because michelle's father was a fireman and and this is one that was his until he passed away and then he came back to us but uh it's just a santa with a fireman's hat holding a teddy bear and making santa's early on were they were pretty much looking like sticks or looking like a block that they were carved from and we were happy with that we thought they looked good other people said they look good and they were happy with those but boy when i see these things now and god knows facebook is filled with them and i'm not gonna try to sugarcoat anything so if i say something that offends you um it was meant to offend you so uh just uh live with it or tell me what you think about me um but i don't care for this kind of a santa anymore um i don't like sticks that are carved into santas and it's because i've learned better ways to do it and i've seen a lot of other things done simple little ornament type things like this we uh we pop these out and try to figure out you know what are we going to put in their hands what are they going to what's going to relate to them uh sticks and staffs are kind of a common element to put in a in a santa and so to make the sticks more interesting we put wildlife on top of the stick so there's a blue bird sitting on this guy and again he's small i mean he's only maybe three or four inches tall total but throwing up throwing an interesting base under a base can really elevate a piece and make it look ten times better than it really is um sometimes santa's just get miscellaneous recruitments sitting around next to them which kind of helps them out this is just a little carved christmas tree and it's a little five piece santa from a cut out kit that i used to put together this is one that michelle carved uh i don't see a date on it but it was before we got together so it was probably in the late 90s that she carved this but she had the painting skills that i lacked at the time she did this one another one of her larger ones back here she did this before we got together before we met and we met because she signed up for a santa class that i was teaching in santa cruz california um but this is some of her early work and she did this one in 98 so that was a year before we a year before we met and you can the style of this is is basically flat bottom rounded body base with some arms and a head and then whatever else you want to throw in you know maybe a backpack but there's not much not much form to the backpack it's just kind of almost relief carved on the surface the paint really um brings everything out on one like this and that style is reminiscent a lot of what you get in russian santas this is one of my favorite russian pieces that we had in the collection the painting is exquisite the toll painting on it this little piece on the back of this santa is reminiscent of what you see on the back of my newer piece so we we we steal ideas basically from from other pieces that we see and we like [Music] we'd like to say that that our work is inspired by a particular style or a particular thing we see but inspiration is just a fancy name for stealing somebody else's work ideas but this was uh this has always been one of my favorites there's not a lot to the carving it's mostly the paint in a piece like this that kicks it off another approach this was carved by nancy goff and nancy's the only one i've seen doing this she goes out in the backyard into the woods and she takes a pair of pruners and starts clipping sticks so there's a little y-shaped stick here becomes an arm more sticks for the legs and then she carves a body and builds it up on a base and then adds in this particular case she added teddy bears to it but nancy is unique in some of the work that she does and i don't know if any of you know of nancy goff but she's kind of uh she's kind of a homebody nancy if you're listening i think you're a homebody you stay home do your thing and it's exquisite and marvelous and i love you you're just a really neat really neat lady so we get you know we get emotionally attached to pieces that are in our collection too um piece back here a larger piece and very stylistic this is the work of al longo al sells his stuff at uh engler's workshop in branson missouri and al lives in branson um another carver that kind of hangs out and spends time with al is uh jesse coost jesse's from the branson area carved at anglers along whoops gotta get some of these out of the way because there's going to be a crash here in a minute this is one of uh this is one of al longo's pieces this is tall this is about 16 inches tall from a 2 by 2 block again a take off on the stick santa thing which is not something that i encourage it's not something i like but this is an exception and jessie's just a really neat guy and a super carver um i talked about pete engler's shop in branson so here here's a few of pete's pieces this is one that pete didn't want to use the real thick work so you can see it's relatively thin it's basically two inch stock but he's rounded it off and just made an exquisite carving out of this and i got a couple more p pieces here this one's painted and finished pretty much the same way the dogwood and the cardinal and this is one of pete's pieces and what one of the ones that inspired the finish that we're using on our carvings now which is boiled linseed oil just totally saturated this carving in fact when i went to take this one off the shelf to bring it out here it was stuck to the shelf so that oil tends to seep dave yes can i ask a question about that oil um finish because i've been kind of waiting for something along those lines yeah i like the look of that so is that is that boiled linseed and then painted and then re-dipped or is it is it painted and then dipped because i use a really really light wash we we if i had a big enough container to boil linseed oil i'd just dip them and then wipe them down and and and then paint right on that um without having a big enough container to do that i brush it on and i just use a disposable foam brush saturated carving with the boiled linseed oil that's that's how i'm doing it now is that one re-dipped at the end after it's painted it looks like no no when i'm done painting i'll put a sealer of uh what the hell is it it's uh krylon okay uh clear coat made by rustole it's not krylon it's rust-oleum i get it at home depot okay so thank you rustoleum clear coat matte this happens to be carved from a rough out this is one that michelle carved and did all the paint on the bag but it was a piece that we designed somewhere back i don't know when sometimes these don't even get forgive me i gotta try to get the tape off see if it's signed it's signed but it wasn't dated that's the problem you always need to date your stuff because if you don't you're going to forget when it was done um this was a more recent piece that we did in in the last before the pandemic hit this was the last santa that i had designed that i could travel and teach this was 2019 [Music] and this particular one was carved from a rough out have some work here from uh dick and nancy moore dear friends they live close we've traveled together nancy is the painter dick is the carver dick was in the air force stationed in germany which is where he learned to carve and he was an officer in the air force a pilot and he came home with carving skills and continued to carve and we're fortunate to have several of their pieces um used to frequently go to dinner with them oops bouncing around here uh paul bollinger a california carver from santa cruz paul's done some books and this is one of one of paul's pieces uh i really like the style on this a lot of the pieces you can get of his are cast pieces this happens to be an original wood carving michelle gets these and she usually if there's a price tag on it she leaves it there so we remember what we paid for them a lot of them um we have because we've set up trades uh one of my first ones that i carved after michelle and i got together was this piece that i carved for her and it's one of the few pieces that i've actually done any sanding on i sanded the arms and the flesh and left the facets in the in the robe and the clothing and i found out that collectors don't like santa's like this this is something to avoid if you want to sell your work to collectors and that's a big open smile collectors see that and they think they look at the santa and they say he looks like he's inebriated so you want to be careful of that with santa's and looking for new approaches and something that hasn't been done before there's not i've not found anything that hasn't been done before be honest with you um in the way of style or anything like that but i came up with this guy and he was inspired by some of james christensen's work um who was an artist who also did some three-dimensional stuff but we did this guy with more of a medieval type of robe you know with the puffy sleeves and [Music] got kind of carried away with the clothing the layers in the hat which is kind of a take off on james christensen's type of work uh christensen lived up in uh ogden utah he's no longer with us but with all due respect to him he had a lot of influence on this particular piece so dave i have another question for you please um i'm looking at your santa that you're going to do the the carving workshop on down here in the corner it's in the corner of my screen okay and then i'm looking at the guy that was right behind them and as i just looked through all of those the faces are not your typical um really curled up mustaches but yet they still look happy yeah that's uh we're getting into expression yeah um am i too soon for that question no no you're too late actually too late i did an expression who am i speaking to this is james james did it we did a uh did a workshop a month ago on expressions okay um what i've learned with santa's i i spent a lot of time over the years talking with pete engler pete's no longer with us so you you're not going to be able to ask him but you can i'll share with you what he what he told me i said pete i want to know what's in your mind when you're carving your santas what what are you thinking about what are you trying to put into the pieces that you do and pete told me he says when i'm carving a santa i'm thinking about a childish face a child's face not proportionally but in in happiness and wonder and amazement and anticipation [Music] of what's coming with regards to the christmas season and uh and he says a pleasant smile everybody likes a pleasant smile he said he he was telling me that everyone likes to be around people who have a pleasant smile and a pleasant disposition everybody avoids the grumpy everybody avoids them they walk around by themselves they're just they don't have a lot of friends they don't have a lot of company around them because people attempt to avoid them and so i don't want to put anything like that into my santas so i wanted to have a pleasant smile a pleasant disposition and he said that's what i found cells if i make them too happy or if i make them grumpy they sit on the shelf for years before somebody will come along and get it and it's only it's only another carver who sees it and thinks that it's cool and and wants it it's not a it's not a collector that i'd be selling it to so what type of advice excuse me what type of advice could you give me because like okay the the santa that you just set down pete engler's the one right behind him i love that mustache but it's not like yeah it's kind of turned i mean it's up but it's also down so it's not like the santa at the very top behind that picture you know his is well to create a smile on this guy you'll notice that these these mustaches don't just droop down the bottom edge of the mustache is key when you get a little pull on the corner of the mouth to create a smile all the hair that's attached to that lip is going to get pulled and that's going to create this little shadow on either side on the corner so it's making the corners go up yes okay right at the corner of the mouth it's going to pull that that's going to get pulled up okay yeah and unfortunately i only started a couple years ago and um i live in i live in north arkansas so i'm only an hour and a half from england um and that's where i buy the majority of my tools and stuff like that so i go up there quite often okay so you can you can take a look at the santas they've got in there and see basically what i'm talking about you're not very fast harold either so keep your ears open when harold's doing something i i would love i've i've laid in the game i understand he's not carving as much as he used to so i'm really disappointed that that's the case but i'm trying to find out when he might be um even just hanging out yeah not as much but i know he's he's he's doing some local stuff so okay yeah he's only like an hour from me yeah he's he would be a great one um yeah bottom of the eyes you're gonna squint up a little bit when that pulls and all that flesh of the cheek gets pulled up into the eye orb and so you get some wrinkles at the top of the cheekbone but it's just it's just basic expression create a pleasant smile avoid the mouth with the tongue showing i used to think that was that was the cool way to do it this is one that i carved and michelle painted she put all that plaid work on there and we i don't care what they said the open mouth santa was still really cool but um i i i just dig the expression i love the smiley face like that so props to you on it regardless of what collectors think so this is one we designed years back um i don't know what year this was done again it's another one that didn't get signed so for whatever reason we go out after christmas when everything's on sale for half price um the day after the week after month after we go out looking for ornaments that are knocked asian knockoffs and we found a bunch of these little nutcracker things and we had this santa with a bag on his back that we were carving boxes and presents to put into all kinds of little toys and knick-knacks and teddy bears and and dolls little dolls and little stick horses and all of that stuff can get stuffed into a box or a bag back here problem is you've got a couple hours easy in a stick horse like this you got maybe three or four hours tied up in a doll like this with the paint you got a good hour or so in the in the carving and painting of this little bear so um this is just a little block of wood that has been wrapped with some christmas wrapping paper to make a gift box to put in in one of these things this little train with a little santa in the back of it that was created to to be an accessory to a santa but you've got hours and hours of time tied up in these things and you can go to a place that sells christmas ornaments and packaging these little these little nutcrackers after christmas one year there was a box of eight of them for 10 bucks so that's a buck and a quarter a piece christ i couldn't for a buck and a quarter it means you'd have to knock one of these out in 15 minutes and even at that you're only going to be making five bucks an hour and and you know you can have as much time tied up in some of these little accessories as you do in the whole damn carving so we started getting we've got boxes and boxes and drawers full of doodads things to make wreaths out of um just to add on to a onto a santa so for a couple of bucks and accessories added on to a carving you can add a couple hundred bucks to the price easy so kind of kind of keep that in mind another extreme carving that i brought out to show you is one of david boone's pieces david likes to take a blow torch to his pieces when they're when they're carved turns them all black see rubs them down seals them and then paints on top of that so you get that black base underneath it gives them a unique look not one of my favorite carvings subject-wise but david happens to be a very close friend and uh so this carving is is really meaningful so it's one he traded to us for one of for one not one of my santas he traded for one of the shells so we get uh we get some of these through trades we get some of them through making purchases and we make the purchases based on what we're able to sell so we'd like to take our money and reinvest it in the carvings i've got a number of ornaments here ornaments are great way to practice um what i've been noticing with ornaments is that they they too often reflect the stick that they were carved from years ago i did an article for wood carving illustrated i say years ago i don't know what year it was you can go back and find it but some of these were in the article and i took a stick inch and a half square and cut it on on the bias which i had not seen anybody else doing um [Music] and started carving these on on these three cornered sticks and that seems to be the way everybody's doing it now but uh played around with different beard styles different types of beards different looks different expressions trying to find out what works different paint schemes got this one with hearts this one penetrated with hearts could you hold those up just a bit so thank you sorry that's great i get lazy the older i get the weaker i get um did some where i really got carried away with the beards 2009 2008 2009 i was going kind of berserk with some of these wanted to do something that hadn't been done before something i hadn't seen before and michelle's always after me to carve a tree to go with a santa i don't know what she has about this thing about santa has to have a tree with it but i after carving so many trees i decided to try to carve a santa beard that was layered like the branches in a pine tree and that was something that was different did this guy where i extended him up made longer stick but still that same type of layered approach to the beard another one here where we took it from the beard to the hat and then the reverse where we did nothing to the beard nothing at all and just lightly with a liner brush painted some scroll work into the beard so it doesn't doesn't all have to be the carving it can be very simple and and where did the idea for a hat like this come from that's my friend pete these are a couple of anglers carvings and the thing i noticed about these that i liked that i didn't see in these that i did like was the the proportional shape how much of this is the santa face just this little area down here in the whole piece the same with this one the face the eyes the nose the mustache right in this little area down here just that little area out of the whole piece is the face on the santa the rest of it is the beard notice how much wider the beard is than the face and if you start looking and doing a little research at guys older guys that have beards the beard really dominates the structure you don't have little tiny short beards on santa's cassette you know the guys with the short beards they only grow the beard for the winter the guys with the with the full beards they let them go and they get they get big and they get enormous so these are just carved from not from the corner of the stick but from the flat and that was from an influence i got from pete so again you could say i i stole that from pete engler but but they're they're influences that we get this guy that we're gonna do in class is inspired by the movie klaus klaus like mouse i was caught for years i'd call it clouds claws that's a k-l-a-u-s and it's not claws if you watch the movie it's klaus if you haven't watched the movie watch it it's a tear jerker um an animated tearjerker which is unusual but this was the this is the guy that i did based on the figure that was in the movie it there's no scene in the movie where he's wearing an outfit like this but his general confirmation and proportional size is what this piece is based on and that comes from working them up in clay first um i had a here's a there's a little pinch model where he's got a small head a large body tapers back down wide at the shoulders and tapers back toward the feet and so that was the shape of the body that i was trying to get into this so i started with this and then converted that to this and the whole thing about that i used uh when i did this one um i did a video and it's if you go to uh wood carving academy you can see the video of me doing this to get an idea how they how it works so what i've what we i we michelle and i what we have collected over the years and this is just a this is just a drop in the bucket we've got 800 of these things in the house um they're they're everywhere we've got so many of them in the house that i was unable to find i wanted to share this one with you and i was unable to find it so this carving is in the house somewhere but i i have nothing of it but a picture right now because it's probably in a box somewhere but uh these things get piled into cabinets and closets and they come out at christmas time come out at thanksgiving and then they about the end of january they go back so when they come out fresh it's like seeing them new for the first time all over hey dave we've again a uh question in the chat uh i know you've done a class on a seated man have you ever done uh any seated santa clauses or sitting in a sleigh something like that um i have i have i'm looking quickly uh sometimes i've got remnants sitting around here in the shop somewhere but i don't see one at the moment um but yeah i know i've done those and uh we've uh we've done kneeling santas there's a there's a thing you see uh uh at christmas time there's there's and i don't know who did it or who gets uh who gets credit for the design of it but there's a an it's like a nativity where the where the uh the baby jesus is in a crash or a manger and uh santa's kneeling over him and and praying and uh and i've done a take off of that um but yeah santa seated in a chair seated at a workbench carving his figures um there's not a lot that i haven't done in 40 years i probably do now maybe three or four different new santas for each season that comes up um i start i start drawing them up and planning on them in early july somewhere around the 4th of july i start you know the the as soon as i hear somebody say it's christmas in july this you know like a six-month break where they start to have sales christmas in july sales when i hear that it triggers something in the back of my head brain and and i start doing santa's in um at least designing them before i'm influenced by stuff that i've seen um i hope to come up with something that's original and different um i keep hoping that that'll happen but nothing is original and different it's all based on stuff that i've seen before something i've seen in the past and it pops into my head when i'm starting to make sketches or starting to draw something out to uh to put it down on paper to see what it's going to look like again try to do a quick sketch or drawing and then try to work that up into a piece of clay at least a small pinch model don't always get it all into the full size of the figure the big advantage to that is being able to uh create a piece that's gonna fit within an affordable piece of wood um oh i got a box full of ornaments that i didn't take out some that i think are are special and better than others um this is one i got last year um i don't care for it as much as some of the other ones but a lot of work went into this this was a bob hershey piece but you know i like it a lot but i i don't want to give him credit for it um this was another piece that i got from a friend who did a great job on it and i've noticed it is i was lucky enough to get this one this is 2019. some of his more recent stuff his beards are getting down kind of tight um he's not using the wood he's his proportional values have changed um some of uh overby's flat plain stuff i like them i like them a lot i just wish they were more christmassy in their color but they're they tend to [Music] get lost in the bright vibrant christmas colors there's a gal lives up in washington state that does these bears and i got her to do this one for me to give to michelle for christmas this is the year after she had her stroke and there's some of these guys with the dangly feet this was if you recognize it was one that sarah had done and this one also with a little little bell on the hat so these little these little recruitments that you add on can make a big difference when it comes to making it a piece that's going to catch the eye or or uh make a sale so you know you can again look around at christmas time or right right after christmas when things are on sale you can find these little bells and stuff at some of the at some of the stores sometimes they'll put them on sale sometimes they put them away in the in the back room and wait for the next season to come around but i was uh years ago our club would do a tree and everybody would add an ornament to it a carved ornament and then they'd sell raffle tickets and draw the name of somebody to win that particular tree with the ornaments on it and i was always bummed because i'd buy all kinds of raffle tickets and of course it would go to somebody who wasn't even a carver but i started just trading with anybody that would trade with me and uh it wasn't but a couple years and i had enough enough ornaments to fill a tree but uh yeah if you if you do a decent job let me know i'll probably be more than happy to trade an ornament with you so but um there's still time to sign up for this for this santa class i'll do do my little pitch real quick here um it's going to be easier to carve from a rough out than it would from a cut out but there is a pattern available if you want to do a cutout do your own but you're just going to be working from a big block of wood so i have not seen the rough out yet due to a unfortunate set of circumstances the rough outs didn't get sent to me so some of the carvers that are going to be in the class already have rough outs and i haven't even seen one yet so i'm i'm hoping it will work out but shoot me an email and i'll send you all the pertinent information on cost and how to sign up how to pay for it see dave yes there's a little guy holding a bag right right in the front row could we see him a little better he's got a guy holding a bag in the front row this guy yep yep just like to see him a little closer yeah it's kind of his his uh robe is kind of pulled up around his tush this is one of those little uh dollar fifty jack ornaments it looks like a jack in the box it's a cast piece that we tied onto a ribbon to put in his hand there was a rough out for this i like how he's leaning forward that kind of without going overboard abs well he has to lean you know he has to lean forward to compensate for the bag if he was straight up and the bag was sitting back here he wouldn't uh he'd look like he's gonna fall over backwards right but that takes kind of that stick out of a simple santa is what is you know what i'm saying yeah yeah try just always trying to come up with something different i mean as many as many different poses as the human anatomy can get put into is they're all options for santa santa could take all of those poses all of those and the movie the movie klaus that was the inspiration for this piece there was a there was a a short very short toward the probably two-thirds three-fourths of the way through the movie where the subject was doing carvings um which is what the movie was based on the reason that he was what he was and why he became how he became um and he was painting a piece and and so it was just a real quick clip but i i liked the way that he was holding the holding the piece up in front of his face to get a good look at it and uh that was the inspiration for this particular pose because you're always trying to figure out if you're carving santa's you know like okay well what am i gonna or any figure it's like what do i do with his hands what am i going to put in his hands what is he going to be holding is he going to be holding anything stick his thumbs in his put his hands in his pockets put him down to his side put his thumbs in his belt um put his thumbs in his pocket they're just all kinds of things that you can do but if you don't have a preconceived notion or a plan it becomes an afterthought and so many of the pieces that i have done over the years and because i've done it i sure can see it in what i see other people doing now most of their work is an afterthought it wasn't it wasn't a conceived idea that was worked into the piece so that only comes i mean some people have minds that think that way mine doesn't my mind is very physical literal i have to see it i have to do it before it makes sense to me dave when you're holding something up like that could you hold real higher so we could all see it i sure can thank you my arms are tired i got the i got it's just the way i've got the foam set how about if i do this does that work better yes we can see it better there thank you thanks for asking [Music] hey david you're uh in your workshops you cover more than just cover you know carving the roof out can you talk a little bit about people or what people would get from the workshop i know you go through like facial structure and beard flow and things like that so people that haven't taken your classes can you tell them yeah most importantly talk about the design the design of a piece what goes into it what inspired it why it is the way it is this particular guy right here you notice that there's one shoulder higher than the other which helps to helps to create the balance in a piece um the design of the piece in order to make him look like he's a big burly wood cutter we have to make his face relatively small um unlike most of the santas i mean take take a look at this guy here his his face is about the same size as this one but look at the size of his body proportions i mean this is this is a huge block of wood to get this effect this block of wood started out four by five and a half but he's only about six and a half inches seven inches tall because proportionally that's what you have to do to get that mass to get that big beard you notice the beard is is three times six times larger than the head and the face and to get them to get the fullness in the hair and to wrap some of it couldn't get it all wrapped in so there's a there's a lot that goes into the design and the thought process to create a piece um to get him so that so that he's holding the carving up that he's painting and looking at it without hiding his face is another you'd have to get it right there before it's hiding his face but from most angles you're going to be able to see that and him to get the brush look like he's working with it but it's it's kind of sitting down for now um could have paint drips on his coat i thought about putting them on there intentionally but then i thought better of it because i figured i'd probably drip some paint down there anyway um but as it turns out it didn't happen on this guy so but yeah the proportional relationships um to create the effect that you're going for knowing what you want to achieve and then the process that you go through to achieve it is i think really important um i'm i'm hearing the term used a lot now that uh people are doodling they're making doodle carvings well i can doodle with a pencil on a piece of paper but i don't doodle with a knife and a block of wood um a wrong cut in the wrong place the doodle just becomes you know firewood or landfill so i don't i like to plan things out i like to have a direction to go and and a meaningful intention to what i'm doing um otherwise i'm just spinning my wheels and wasting a lot of time god knows i've wasted a lot of time over the years is there a particular skill level you suggest for this class you know that that question comes up all the time if you're a beginner and you do beginning projects you'll always be a beginner you won't advance until you challenge yourself and try to achieve things that you're not capable of doing um and in a class situation i've always tried to take a class that was over my head something that i wasn't ready for i took a caricature drawing class from tom richmond tom is probably one of the foremost illustrators cartoonist caricature artist in the country today did a lot of work for mad magazine but that's that's been non-existent now for a while but tom uh tom was teaching us stuff that i wasn't ready for um that i wasn't qualified to do but he started the class by saying i'm not going to teach you how to draw i'm going to teach you how to see and i can't begin to tell you how important those words became because until you can see the subject and you can see the minor differences between one thing and another before you learn to see you'll never learn to create so creating with a piece there's nothing to carving wood it's one of the simplest things you can do there's only three things you can do to a piece of wood you can dig into it make a depression make a concave spot in the wood you can round it over knock off the corners make it a convex shape or you can slice it flat and make a flat plane and it's the way you put those concave and convex and flat surfaces together that create the image that you see and the skill required to do that is the ability to sharpen your tools and once you've got a sharp tool it's just practice making cuts but more importantly it's learning to observe and learning to see the reason our collection is extensive as it is is because i'd see something i liked that was different and i'd grab it because i wanted to steal the idea from them i just wanted it i just wanted to be able to try it to see if i could create the same effect i'm looking over here for an example in this russian santa that i'm sitting here looking at [Music] if you look in his at his robe here in the lower part of him you see how that undulates in and out it's all in the paint this is carved flat all the way up there's a little bit of a depression on either side of the belt here but it's all in the paint so we've studied those painting techniques painting styles there's some things that we've already known but you don't just take a carving when you're done with it especially if with a santa and dunk it into antiquing solution to darken the cracks and the crevices and the cuffs you don't want to antique it that just makes them dirty i don't want to have a bunch of dirty sandals sitting on my shelf or a bunch of santas that looked her you can see how michelle has done it in this now she has carved some depressions in here but she's gone back in with the paint and darkened all these creases to accentuate them even more so it has a lot more movement and depth and it appears to have a lot more than it really has but that's that's in learning the painting it's technique in the carving carving's easy easy to do well thanks for the question tell us again dave when uh when that class is scheduled it's uh saturday and sundays for three weekends um starts november the 6th question i see all of these uh carvings that you have there and i don't see any grain of the wood now you seal those could you go through in your process of sealing the wood before you paint it so we don't see the grain of the wood maybe i gotta get it closer it might be losing something in the video but i can see grain of the wood and all of these oops let's just grab this guy here um can you see the wood grain in this one yes again okay um i think it shows a little more in this one than it does some of the others but uh no wood grain shows in in all of these pieces um in order to get a good red there's a lot of layering that goes on um this guy has a base coat but he's not finished he has never gotten a cherry red on top of this red base coat so there's another layer that's going to go on here i can still see the from where i'm at looking at this i can still see all the wood grain and it uh it hopefully won't be hidden by the time i get the darker coats on him but uh yeah like the russian santa he's painted a little heavier um some of these angler pieces i can well there's no paint on the back so you really see the wood grain there but i can see the wood grain through his rope here another interesting thing about this particular piece is that uh pete went in with some kind of a power tool i'm guessing and with a real coarse bit and roughed up the surface where the fur is and around the hat so it's a lot rougher it's not smooth and so when he painted it it kind of gave it more texture but pete created that texture on there didn't put it in the beard so the beard looks completely different under his arms turn it turn it uh turn it one way yeah under the arms uh there you've got a darker color how do you do that it's a different color okay put another different color in there yeah instead of antiquing you go in and you do some uh you do some shading all right um on the reds of the santas we use a color called black plum and that became unavailable a year ago but they've got it back now i guess it's all around the edges on these ornaments here we've used it in here for the shading and before we start we take uh burnt sienna and everywhere that we want shadows to be we'll put that burnt sienna in there so on this beard there after the linseed oil is put on there we come in with a burnt sienna and we come in with a primary yellow to give it some warmth and then the white is layered on with several washes it's built up so there's probably there's probably five light washes of white to get to the to get to the final touch here there's one here you can see but see how it's there's more white in some areas than there is in others and it blends out here's one you can see the brown and the yellow and the beard sorry dave do you let that fully dry you between each coat or do you do it as its weight yeah keep out not not always but i try to um if you don't let it dry you can be wiping off what you've got on there you need to let it it doesn't have to be dry but it needs to be set there's a point when you're painting there's a point when the when the wash that you put on sets up and you would have a difficult time wiping it off at that point it's ready for another layer so you don't have to wait for it to completely dry so it's a it artists often call it painting wet on wet so there's still dampness in the in the surface of whatever you're painting on you can do it you can do it on a painting flat art you can do it as a as a water colorist you can do it as a wood carver so it's just that our our paint surface has some three-dimensional value to it that a canvas doesn't have but we do the same thing that that a painter does on a on a canvas when they're painting a figure or a portrait or a landscape yeah do you let your boiled linseed oil dry completely like two or three days a week whatever no you know as soon as i'm done with it uh getting it on there i'll take a paper towel and dab off any drips or heavy recess where it's built up in the recesses in there where it's heavy i might dab out some of that the thing to remember with boiled linseed oil is that using paper towels and stuff to wipe it down and dab it and stuff um they are combustible they become highly flammable um so you want to be sure to to discard them properly laying them out don't let them don't wad them up in a ball you want to lay them out flat or put them in a container of water and then you got no problems but you can i just go right to it with the paint in fact when i'm painting i'm constantly going over and washing my hands because i'm just my hands are just reeking with linseed oil so you still use uh blo for your preparation i do i haven't found anything i like better until something better comes along that's what i'm going to use dave do you use a hair dryer at all when you're drying like before drying no if you're using boiled linseed oil and you hit it with a hair dryer any of that oil that's penetrated into the wood is going to bubble back out to the surface yeah you know you don't want to use a hair dryer it's never been an issue for me i'm in a i'm in a very low humidity environment here in arizona if anything things dry too fast but uh no it's and i know that a lot of uh a lot of like bird carvers and painters they'll use the hair dryer a lot to be learned from bird carvers if you take a bird class i took a bird class just to learn how to paint using an airbrush and i learned enough about it to know that the bird carvers use a a regular paintbrush more than they use an airbrush the airbrush is just the final detail work that they put into the bird so it just it's just more trouble than it's worth to clean an airbrush so that it's going to work for you the next time you use it um but uh it's everything that everything that people do in an if it's based on art if it's based on paint if it's based on creating an image of three dimensions um you want to learn as much as you can about it because it's only going to benefit you it might be a class in drawing classes and drawing are not are nothing more than they're not teaching you how to apply a pencil lead to a piece of paper to to to draw they're teaching you how to see how to get your hand to coordinate with your eye to reproduce what your eye is seeing on a piece of paper everybody knows how to mark a piece of paper with a pencil or a crayon or how to take paint and take it from a pallet to a brush to a surface and uh whether that surface happens to be canvas or wood or paper or you know in the case of watercolors it doesn't matter it's it's all the same process technically you're going to be doing the same thing a lot of a lot of carvers use oil paints on their pieces so uh i happen to use acrylics i like acrylics they dry oil tends to take a while and uh oftentimes if i'm if back when we were doing a lot of shows we'd be painting right up to the night before the show so i mean we we get in there and open a box of carvings and it's like you get we get hit with a with a gush of uh of linseed oil smell coming out of the box as we open up but uh yeah acrylics work best for my purposes and still do um if something better comes along i'll give it a shot um every day on facebook there's a guy his name is eric rhodes and he highlights a different artist every day and they're they're flat surface painters either watercolorist or or painters um and they talk about prepping for a painting they do a demonstration every day it lasts for about an hour comes on at nine o'clock arizona time it's on facebook eric rhodes and you can follow along and listen to what these artists have to say about how they observe the subject about the materials that they use about the brushes now it's not about it's not about the carving it's about the finishing and i mean when it comes to carving it's the easiest thing in the world to do it's uh it's almost easier than working with clay clay is softer more malleable but that can be a drawback because you can't get the nice smooth surface in the clay without being really careful as you can in wood wood seems to be a little more forgiving medium i think the nice thing about clay is if you you remove too much you can put it back on which is a little more difficult to do with the wood but that's uh that's a good reason for for rather than doodling in the wood to to plan it out to know what you're going to do before you start you can save yourself a bunch if it takes you an hour to carve something if you spend five minutes planning it out before you start you can usually do it in 30 to 40 minutes so it takes you less time and you end up with better results so dave one other question in the chat here and then we'll finish up it's about 20 after four um what shade of yellow paint do you use on the beards on your santa clauses primary primary just primary yellow yeah if i run out of that i might play around and try something else but i always tend to go back to that primary yellow any other questions for dave today before we finish up i assume there'll be some discussion of paint in the november class excuse me there will be probably a discussion of painting for the november class oh yeah yeah awesome whether we'll actually paint the figure in class or not will depend on how far along we get how much time we talk about design and everything else that goes with it i tend to i tend to be a little bit uh wordy so uh i don't have my wife here to wrap me up and and tell me this i've been talking too long well dave i'll go ahead and uh and stop you here um we're at about almost 25 after four so just want to say thank you again for the support uh you've always been generous with your time as far as coming on and helping us out and i appreciate that uh make sure you all go out um sign up for dave's class again it starts on november 6th you can reach out to him directly i think you can find him on messenger on on facebook if you need to get the email address we posted it in the chat if you want to go over and check that out but make sure you sign up for his class it's well worth the time and you'll learn quite a bit so check out his class i just wanted to tell you all again before we stop here we're going to be bidding on this heavy knife um right now the current bid looks to be 135 included with the uh that bid is also this international association wood covers hat this is a richardson hat these hats we're going to make available in the very near future so this will be the first one very first one that is available so if you're interested in that make sure you go out and bid on that i will leave that open again here for just a few more minutes in the chat so place your bids there i wanted to tell you a little bit about the schedule that we have coming up again dave was on today thank you dave for coming on with us next week we'll have mr jared wood on uh jared carves some fantastic pumpkins and santa clauses you can find him on facebook i think he's going to come on and do a demonstration for us so make sure you check out jared and come on with us next week after that on the 6th of november uh helve knives is going to be on so rich and holly is going to come on they're going to be broadcasting live from their shop and rich is actually going to be making a knife during that meeting and we'll do the same thing we're actually going to run an auction for the knife that he's making during the meeting uh so you'll be able to bid on and win the knife that he makes while they're talking to us so uh pretty unique idea unique opportunity so make sure you come on and check that out again that's november the 6th cca member ryan olson will be on with us november the 13th uh cca member duane gosnell will be on with us november the 20th uh we're taking the 27th of november off for the united states thanksgiving so we won't be meeting that week we'll pick back up on december the 4th we'll have dave dion on if you're not familiar with dave i think he won first second and third place in the cca competition this year um go out and check out the cca website caricature carvers of america and look at the results of the most recent uh competition and you'll see his work out there so dave will be coming on with us on december the 4th uh del green who i saw is on with us today he's done a demonstration for us in the past uh he's also a cca member he's going to be on with us on december the 11th and then we're going to round out the year with eric owens that's going to come on on december the 18th eric's presented with us in the past as well and he teaches classes and has some videos out on youtube so check out eric's work we'll be off the week of christmas and the week of new year and hope to pick back up in the beginning of january in the meantime we'll also be filling in with some other podcasts so again check out the carving podcast tom and i are doing interview style meetings on those and it's just tom and i and then one or two other people so check those out the most recent one we did was with our cass and doug linker made a special uh visit in that meeting so check it out it was a lot of fun so i want to say thank you all for joining us today again this is the international association wood carvers uh we're bringing to you all things wood carving we've got a pretty good schedule through the end of the year so make sure you join us each week we had 84 people on today that's a pretty good start to uh to rounding out the year so hopefully we can continue to have more participation through the end of the year and uh we'll see you all next saturday at 3 p.m eastern standard time that's on october the 30th with mr jared wood thank you all for joining us today again dave stetson thank you thanks for the support and uh tune in next week to uh to the international association of wood carvers thank you all and blake it looks like elliot silvers is the winning bid with 150. all right so ella if you'll stay on we'll go ahead and take care of that here at the end thank you all for participating in that and uh we'll have other giveaways and auctions coming up so thank you

Channel: International Association Of Wood Carvers

Views: 2,248

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: carving, carver, woodcarving, woodcarver, carving wood, caricature carving, caricature, whittling

Id: bcq36Hd1dU0

Length: 81min 56sec (4916 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021