Carving Project: Graphite Tree

Carving Project

For this project our goal was to take some object or material, carve it and manipulate it in order to make it appear like another material or object. Rather than making something that was clearly wooden or clearly wax, for example, the idea was to fool the viewer's eyes. 

At first I had very little idea what I wanted to make. I remembered during the mold projects how much I enjoyed working with the wax so initially my idea was to carve candlesticks. I didn't want to make a series of just random shapes or objects so I decided that combining them in some way could be interesting. I decided a tree could be simple yet different enough from the original candlestick. After talking with Eric, he suggested that I use a wire frame for the tree and drip the wax onto that. Although I liked the idea of having exposed wicks on the tree limbs, the problem remained that they still looked like candles.

Next I decided to abandon the whole candlestick idea and move onto the brown wax. After dripping wax onto my wire frame I was left with a large tree that very much looked like it was made of wax. I have to admit thought that leaving it in this way would have looked very interesting, but wouldn't have followed the guidelines well enough. So I carved the drops and blobs away from my tree to smooth it out and make it have a little more natural and organic surface. Finally to transform the object's look further I added graphite powder to every inch of the tree's surface. This produced a really shiny, silver gloss that contrasted the original wax texture very nicely. I then used the heat gun and let the graphite sink into the wax a little deeper which allowed that silver color to mesh even better, but retain its sheen as well.