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You want to be prepared before you begin painting your bird carving. In this video, acclaimed carver Floyd Scholz explains what you should do before the paint hits the wood.
Transcript
Hi. I’m Floyd Scholes. I’ve been carving birds for fifty years now and during that fifty year period, I’ve developed a technique for painting and transforming a block of wood into a believable bird. Why don’t you come and join me into this fascinating world of bird carving, which celebrates the majesty and the beauty of the birds around us.
Bird carving is an art form evolved in the North American region, and its roots firmly placed in the tradition of the American decoy. Going back several hundred years, originally birds were carved out of wood to attract flying waterfowl overhead into the gun barrels of hunters, but in nineteen eighteen, the Migratory Bird Act outlawed market gunning, and bird carving, some of the better bird carvers and decoy carvers, began attracting not wild ducks flying overhead, but they began attracting collectors who were interested in purchasing these beautiful bird carvings, not to hunt over, but to adorn their mantles in their living rooms.
If you look at bird carving you’ll see that it’s one of the most beautiful forms of art. It incorporates so many beautiful elements such as sculpture, painting, a love of the outdoors and a celebration of the majesty of the birds around us. With nine thousand three hundred species of birds found worldwide, we as artists celebrating birds in art and sculpture have quite a deep well from which to draw inspiration and color.
Speaking of color, I’d like to share with you some tips that I’ve developed over the years of painting onto the textured and carved surface of the wood.
In my many years of attending carving shows around the country and teaching carving seminars, I would be willing to bet that if you took a survey among bird carvers and asked them which of the two disciplines they find more challenging, the carving and texturing of the bird itself or the painting, I’m certain that more than eighty percent would say the painting poses more anxiety and more challenges.
Like anything, you break it down to its simplest forms, it could be approached in a very simplistic and thoughtful manner. The key is to relax. Prepare your work surface and before you begin painting, just consciously relax your shoulders and know that nothing will happen without you making it happen. We’re going to keep our color mixes very simple, we’re going use just a very limited amount of paint on our palette, and we’re going to do a lot of painting with a very little paint. So that alone will save you a lot of money when you go to the art store.
Paint companies are hoping that you don’t know much about mixing colors so they can sell you every color under the rainbow. Once you learn a little bit about the magic of painting and color theory, you’re going to find that a whole new world will open up to you. A world of possibilities of softness, depth, color correction, and transforming an otherwise inanimate block of wood into a believable and beautiful piece of art.