Wooden Whale Sculpting Process

…gouging, rasping, scraping and sanding away every infinitesimal fiber that isn’t “Whale.”

  • Show All
  • Blue Whale Trio
  • Humpback Whale Carving
  • Bulbous Blue Whale
  • Blue Whale Sculpting Process
  • Humpback Cow and Calf Process

“Basically, there are two ways to sculpt something. One either “constructs” a 3D image by combining materials and attaching them together somehow to make a form or, one “extracts” it from a solid mass, as is the case with the wooden forms herein. This means doing a lot of visualizing, drawing, sawing, mallet and hand gouging, chiseling, rasping, shaving, scraping and sanding away every infinitesimal fiber that isn’t “whale.”
I liken this woodworking method to the lapidary process of cutting and polishing stone, adding; each material’s characteristics creates there own kind of rules…and pain. It is said that “patience is a virtue” and a fundamental requirement in order to achieve “perfection” via either the extraction or construction processes of sculpting.John C. Jackson