Transmitted colour

​This month I’m urging you to try cutting and grinding your pieces thinly.  Why?  Because then you see the beauty of the form and, if using translucent material, you also see the inner beauty of the stone as well.

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Figure 1 shows one of the almost finished petals with transmitted light coming through.  The edges tend to be rounded, a little thinner and thus able to catch more light

​I only tried this because I was asked to carve a remembrance poppy.  It’s what I love about commissions – they take me in directions I probably wouldn’t otherwise try!
 
I thought about the form of the poppy for a while, looked at many pictures of the flowers (I try to base my work on a particular example where applicable), saw that the Remembrance Day poppies made out of paper and plastic are an over-simplification of the flower and knew I could improve on them by making each of the petals from a different piece of highly translucent nephrite, Cowell in this case, and fitting them together in a wooden centre, or stock.
 
You’ll see in the picture below I chose to carve a young flower, where the delicate petals are somewhat corrugated and still opening and smoothing out.  It seemed fitting in the context.
 
After slabbing the stone and trimming it to size and shape I used my 75 mm diameter coarse wheel to begin to thin the stone.

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Figure 2 shows my 75 mm diameter wheel having ground down one of the petals.  You can remove most of the stone with it in fact 

​Following this I used a smaller and finer 20 mm wheel in my Dremel to grind out the ridges on both sides.  It meant lots of looking through the stone to check I was grinding in the right places but worked a treat.  If carved carefully you hardly see the ridges in transmitted light.

Figure 3 shows my smaller grinding wheel having done its work.  With this tool you can grind the finer features on your petals

​The more-or-less finished petal is shown in side-profile in the picture below.  The petal is about 1 mm thick and combines the beauty of the stone in both reflected and transmitted light.

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Figure 4 shows the edge-on view as well as the plan view of another petal.  Corrugations like these are typical of petals in a newly opened flower

​And before I finish, I should add that Chinese carvers have been producing pieces to show off the inner beauty of the stone in just this fashion for thousands of years.  So it’s not new, except to me!  My next plan is to combine this new-found carving "freedom" in a Maori carving context.  Hmm, now to think of a suitable design?!