Cutting Grounds

by **Eleret** on November 4th, 2012, 9:13 pm

Fall 43, 479 AV
early afternoon

For her twentieth birthday, Eleret had asked for woodcarving tools. She had seen other Konti display artwork wrought in wood of various sorts, from ornamental reliefs to decorative statues, sometimes stained but often left to display the wood's natural hues. Where her mother played music and her sister loved the living grace of plants, Eleret saw something uniquely appealing in the art of taking this once-living material and using it to represent other things either abstract or alive in their own right. She wanted to do the same.

Meline encouraged her daughters to develop their own interests, so while carving had no appeal for her, she was happy to further her daughter's entrance into the art. The kit had been joyously received six days before, and after some introductory education in how to and how not to employ them, today the girl finally had the much-awaited opportunity to put her tools to use.

Eleret sat now at the kitchen table with her kit unrolled beside her right hand, gouges and chisels all arrayed in their respective retaining loops. It also contained a brush, for clearing away bits and pieces; two simple stamps for texturing; a small mallet to go with the chisels and stamps; and a scrap of leather she could use when sanding. Several different pieces of wood lay to her left, small panels fit for a student to practice on: fir, spruce, cedar, and pine.

She picked up each in turn for closer study, starting with the one furthest away. The pine wood had a yellowish tone to it, and a strong scent when she lifted it closer to her face. The cedar block had a distinctive scent as well, and a pronounced grain, with more orange to its color. Conversely, both the spruce and fir pieces were very pale, with thin lines, and lacked any scents she could detect; they would have been harder to tell apart, if she hadn't been told what tree each piece came from.

by **Eleret** on November 5th, 2012, 12:28 am

Eleret decided to start with the piece of fir, setting it directly in front of herself. Like the others, it was about the length of her forearm, slightly shorter than her hand, and not very thick. The wood itself had been cut from a larger piece, coarse saw marks patterning its ends. This one had no knots marring the grain, which she had been told were tricky to work around. All in all, it seemed like a good starting piece.

She thought a leaf pattern would look nice on the wood, white relief on a stained background -- after she finished cutting out the voids around the leaves, what she remembered was called a ground, and got something dark to stain it with. She could envision it now in almost the detail of reality, sitting up on the mantlepiece, where it would make her mother proud to say my daughter made that whenever anyone else came over to visit. She smiled at the thought, excited to imagine her project thus.

Now, to realize that vision.

She would draw leaves in a border. Strawberry leaves, with a runner arcing between them, and maybe one little flower in the very center. Or one between each leaf set -- but that could be decided later. The leaves, first. Eleret pictured in her mind how the leaf triplets would look... four of them, two on the left and two on the right, each leaf in the trio a hair more oblong than round, with little teeth around the edge and lines of veins radiating from the stem. When she felt like she had the picture fixed just so, the girl plucked the littlest gouge from her kit and looked to the wood.

She'd start with outlining the one on the left, Eleret decided, setting the tool to the wood and pressing down.

by **Eleret** on November 18th, 2012, 1:23 am

She began with short, shallow cuts, shaving off tiny curls of white wood. Her first one may have gouged a little deep; Eleret wasn't sure, but the wood seemed even softer than she had thought, at least when it was a proper tool doing the cutting and not a surreptitious test by fingernail. She lightened her next press, and took off an even thinner piece, nearly as thin as the paper of a book. That, Eleret thought, was probably about what she should be doing -- just enough of a cut to define her design. Satisfied, she continued.

Each pair of cuts outlined one tooth of the first leaflet, worked around its edge from bottom to top, with a gap left where she intended to join it to the others in its trio. Eleret paused often between teeth, checking the position of the next against the last, making sure they traced out the oblong shape she wanted. Despite all her care, when the girl got all the way around to the other side and stopped to take in the whole thing... well, it looked just a little skewed, where one side had started to dimple in and she'd needed to nudge the following ones back out. But really, it wasn't too bad, all things considered...

Feeling pleased with herself, Eleret switched to the brush, sweeping the bits of excised debris away from the plank. Then she moved on to the next part.

This would be the right leaflet of the trio, a near mirror-image of the first. Like the first, she started from the bottom of the leaflet and worked around the inside, leaving a gap where she would link the leaves together and add in the stem after that. This time, she was more mindful of keeping the teeth in line, one aligned to the next -- but when Eleret finished that outline and sat back to look at the whole picture... well, the right leaflet wasn't as much of a mirror as she'd intended. It had come out more oblong, narrower in breadth than its counterpart.

It was frustrating. She could see the design in her head perfectly, it should have come out like that!

Maybe, the girl realized then, she should have started with a drawing first, even though drawing wasn't part of her conception of carving. Something she could look at, hold up against the wood. She'd have to consider that for the future, at any rate. For now, she'd at least finish this first design, even if it didn't come out quite as planned...

by **Eleret** on November 18th, 2012, 1:57 am

Eleret cleaned the surface again and worked her way through the third leaflet, completing the set. No two of the trio were quite alike; she had started to make the top leaflet too wide, and had to scrunch its side back in as she came around towards the right-hand leaf. Studying all three of them, she wrinkled her nose at this unfortunate development -- then noticed something else. Where her hands had steadied the piece of fir, and where they had braced the gouge in its work, the white wood had become noticeably darker, taking on a sort of grey-brown tint distinctly unlike the rest of the surface.

Eleret set her tools aside and rubbed at the stain: it didn't come off. Didn't show signs of lightening, or spreading either. And her hands felt dry, as though the normal oils had been washed off -- or absorbed by the wood while she handled it. Something else she might have to note for the future: only carve with clean hands. It didn't really matter for the moment -- this piece wasn't going to get any better, much less satisfy her original grand vision, so it wasn't really a big deal if it came out still worse...

Picking the gouge back up, she set about etching in the smooth lines which completed the bottom of each leaf, outlining the short little stalks at their bases. Those stalks merged into the thicker stem, which the girl outlined only a short segment of; she no longer planned to do more than this one leaf, so the stem didn't need to go anywhere. That completed, Eleret then outlined a box around the whole design -- simple, straight... well, basically straight, and mostly square... lines which defined the background space.

Then Eleret set the little gouge aside, and took up a flat gouge instead. Using this tool, she began shaving wood out of the ground, paring the entire region between the outer box and the strawberry leaves down one thin curl of wood at a time.

It was slow, monotonous work; after the first rush of excitement at starting a new stage wore off, the girl began to realize just how tedious this pursuit could be. After a little while, she got up and walked around the room, just for the sake of doing something different.

by **Eleret** on November 18th, 2012, 3:01 am

After stretching her legs out, Eleret walked over to one of the room's windows, leaning up against it and peering outside. It was a roughly west-facing window, one which caught direct sunlight on summer evenings but not so much on this fall afternoon. Still, it provided a view of the sun-dappled outdoors, in this instance a waterscaped garden which was the apple of her grandmother's eye. The irises were beginning to die back, leaves showing brown around the edge, but the reeds they were planted with remained pleasingly green and tall.

The girl reached her arms upwards, leaning forward on the balls of her feet and stretching up as high as she could. Then she let her arms drop back down, rolling her shoulders and turning away from the window. Back to the task at hand -- after she finished this, maybe she'd go swimming. That would be nice.

Eleret walked back over to the table and slid into the chair, picking up the flat-bladed gouge and considering what was left of her project. She needed to finish up one side, then work on deepening the recessed ground; it still seemed too shallow as it was now. Nodding to herself with that thought, she set about shaving out the rest of the defined negative space, determined to get through the tedious process.

Afterwards, the finishing touch was to stamp a texture onto the ground, which would make it more interesting and provide a better contrast to the raised leaf. Well, that wasn't quite true -- the real finish would be to stain the ground a dark color, offsetting the naturally pale wood, but Eleret didn't have a stain to hand. She probably wouldn't do it anyway, since this piece had turned out not so great.

She set aside the gouge, brushed more wood bits away from her work surface, and took up the two stamps in her kit, turning them over to look at the textured ends. One had a sort of cross pattern, while the other was just a bunch of round dots; Eleret opted to use the dots, since they reminded her a bit of strawberry seeds.

by **Eleret** on November 18th, 2012, 3:18 am

She set the stamp against a corner of the ground, where she had the most open space to work with, and tapped cautiously down on the handle with the mallet. When Eleret took it away, she really couldn't see any effect on the wood, softwood though it was; running her fingertips over the area revealed what might have been small divots, or maybe just irregularities in her excisions. Which there undoubtedly were.

Nonetheless, she set the stamp to the corner again and struck it harder, attempting to make deeper marks. This time, when she removed the stamp, Eleret could actually see the dimples it left behind. She smiled to herself, pleased at getting a noticeable mark, and proceeded to stamp as much of the rest of the ground as she could with the dot pattern.

When the texturing was completed, or as complete as it could be, the girl took a moment to consider the product. The carving was recognizably a strawberry leaf in design; not an ideal one, nor even a quite realistic one, but recognizable. While she had been disappointed and frustrated with how it came had come out, now that it was done Eleret felt a sense of pride. It wasn't perfect, but it was hers, and she'd made it entirely by herself.

Cheered by the thought, the Konti girl set about cleaning up the workspace, putting her tools away in their kit and sweeping up the shavings to put outside. Kit and planks were stored neatly away in her room for future use. Then Eleret set off outside, debating at which of her favorite swimming places she should spend the remainder of the afternoon...