Welcome to my workshop
I first started experimenting with creating art out of stone over 10 years ago and it eventually went from a hobby to a more or less full time business. Over the years it’s grown and evolved as I’ve realized that I love working with wood as much as stone and new materials like resin have opened intriguing new possibilities. I get a lot of questions about how I create my art - so here’s a peek into how I make the magic (ok, mostly sawdust) happen.
I start by creating a design which is then transferred to the wood. Depending on the size and how I want it to interact with the wood grain I either rough it in with a palm router or program my CNC router to do the roughing. After the roughing pass I carve all the detail work by hand using a Foredom running end mills.
The properties of the rock (like hardness and opacity) determine how it needs to be crushed to get the desired effect in the art.
I order rocks online or find them in the wild and then crush them myself to get the size I need.
The crushed rocks then get placed into the piece using the color in the rocks to create the color in the image. I use tweezers to place the bigger pieces and then fill around them with finer grades of rock. I then glue the rocks in, sand the piece and repeat the fill, glue, sand process until the piece is smooth and there are no cracks remaining between the rocks.
Once I’m done adding rock I sand the pieces up to at least 1000 grit and add a hand rubbed oil finish.
Something I’ve started to experiment with is creating multi-depth carves and using resin to create pieces that have both visual and physical depth. I’m only just starting to scratch the surface of the possibilities of what this process could create and I’m excited to see where it will go!
