Smoke and Mirrors
Breaking the illusion of woodcarving down into something anyone can learn.
This appears to be a photo of a leather strap wrapping two pieces of bamboo.
It isn’t that at all…
It’s actually a block of wood, cut from a tree, milled into a piece of lumber, then carved, reshaped, stained, and tinted to make you believe it’s two pieces of bamboo wrapped with leather straps.
This’s just an optical illusion… it’s about giving the eye just enough information for the mind to fill in the blanks.
Relief woodcarving isn’t two dimensional, like a drawing or painting. It’s not three dimensional like a statue either. It’s somewhere in between those two things. The carving depth itself is actually quite shallow, but the use of light, shadow, and overlapping forms makes it appear much deeper than it is.
The idea is to fool the viewer’s eye into believing that it’s something it’s not.
There’s a recipe for doing this. A six-step, definable method for creating the illusion of depth in a repeatable way.
Woodcarving is a hackable skill, even for someone who isn’t an artist and has never done any woodworking. This is my secret recipe and it’s what I teach at Hippie Camp, our beginning woodcarving retreats.
I’ll also be writing about it in my upcoming book, Failing Forward, published by Fox Chapel Publishing.
Stay tuned here for more…