Our Stone Carvings

In late April, 2006, I met a local stone carver that influenced me to try carving a stone. I found a site and ordered a soapstone block. Here's Baby checking it out.
I started the sculpture on Friday, April 28, after lunch. Here's an image of Baby and George inspecting the piece Friday evening.
On May 3rd, the work was completed.
Stone carving is hard, hot work, but it sure is fun!
Here's our studio. I allow the boys out there, only when I'm carving wood. Even though I have three HUGE fans blowing, I don't want them to breathe any dust from a stone.
I fell in love with stone carving and ordered two more stones. Here's Baby' checking out the delivery box. The dirty wall came from Zack, our bulldog that died in August, 2005. I just haven't been able to bring myself to clean up his favorite sleeping spot. 
Here are the boys checking out the new stone. The stone in the foreground is amber calcite, and the one in back is alabaster. This is not a hobby for sissies. The calcite weighs 77 pounds and the alabaster weights 33 pounds.

Here's the alabaster stone before I started work on it. This was taken on 11/30/06.

Here's an image of me carving a bulldog out of alabaster.
Here's an image of my work taken on 12/4/06.

Here's my work as of 12/5/06. There's still a lot of finishing that must be done before he's completed.
I finished the sculpture on 12/14/06

I started a new sculpture on March 17, 2007. After a short time, I decided to purchase a compressor and pneumatic tools.

Here's an idea I came up with for carving templates made of plexiglas.

 

Our compressor arrived on March 28,2007. The boys are very curious about the machine.
The pneumatic system is great! There are no stone chips flying all over the room. This is translucent alabaster that I'll place on a stand with a light under it and it should illuminate entire sculpture.

Even the toys worked on this sculpture, as I slept.
Getting closer, all the time.

And he's almost finished, except for more 
smoothing.

Here are different views of a honeycomb calcite bulldog that I sculpted.

Here's a sculpture created from orange Colorado alabaster. Kent Grubbs created an animation of her. Watch and you'll see her blink her eyes!


This is a block of steatite. One of my favorite figurines broke, so I glued the remains and decided to create something a little more durable.


Here's the stone sculpture in progress.


And here's the finished sculpture.


Stone Sculptors' Supplies threw this chunk of orange Colorado alabaster in free when I ordered a 75 pound block of marble. I could tell right away that this was a gem of a stone.


And this is what came out of the stone!



Here's an orange Colorado alabaster shark. I'm not real happy with his tail, but that's all the room the stone would allow for.

I have developed an Excel File that 

Carving_Block_Calculator.xls
Helps you determine the optimum block size 
for a sculpture if you're using a figurine as a guide. 
Click Here to download the file.

 

 Stone_Weights.xls
Helps you determine the weight of a stone
by its dimensions.
Click Here to download the file.

 

 

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