First Attempt at Relief Carving
I've been meaning to try relief carving for a couple years now. I used Mike Henderson's vastly useful tutorials over at Mike's Woodwork. I decided to try to do the five petal flower, for a couple reasons. It seems easy enough for a first try, and the design has some personal significance to me. Given the amazing work that's been posted here lately, including lots of fabulous carvings, I'm a bit tentative about posting my humble effort.
Anyway, this is a five petal flower cut in a piece of old poplar I had lying around. Here it is about half done. All together it took me about 2 1/2 hours. (I was being very careful and deliberate. (Dave Diaman could probably build three lowboys in the same amount of time.) The basic shape took me about an hour to rough in on Wednesday night.