There are almost as many variations of the carved fan as there are shells. This one is very simple but elegant and easy to carve - a beginning carver should be able to carve this fan.
These fans were used on early American furniture, often on the center drawer of a lowboy. A drawer pull (almost certainly a round knob) was placed in the lower center of the fan. So when you look at the fan we're carving, try to imagine a drawer pull as part of the fan.
I'm using a piece of 3/4" Honduras mahogany about 6 1/2" wide. This piece is longer, but a piece about 10" in length will work well.
The first thing we'll do is the layout. I draw a vertical line 5" from the end (if the piece was 10" long, I'd split it in half), and a horizontal line about 1 1/2" from the bottom (edit: if I was doing it over, I'd use 1 1/4" from the bottom). Using the intersection of those two lines as the center point, I draw a half circle with radius 4", and another with radius 3 3/4". Finally, I draw a small circle with a 3/4" radius.
If you were doing this on a real piece of furniture, you'd have to scale these measurements to fit your drawer.
Carved-fan-01.jpg
We begin our carving by making a downward cut with a #7/25 gouge to outline the lower half circle. Note that I didn't cut exactly to the line - I cut just a bit away from the line. As I do the rest of the carving, I'll "damage" the side of that half circle. As the final carving, I'll trim back to the line and remove that damage.
Carved-fan-02.jpg
Next, I begin cutting away the wood on the outside of that half circle so that it stands proud by about 1/4".
Carved-fan-03.jpg
Carved-fan-04.jpg
Next, I need to lay out the flutes. I actually should have done this as part of my original layout, but I forgot to do it then. I can do it now with no problems to the carving. I want about 12 flutes across the fan, which means 6 on each side. I use the dividers and adjust until I get six even spaces.
There's nothing magic about having 12 flutes - you can use as many or as few as you choose - but 12 is a good compromise. If you use a lot more than 12, the flutes get too narrow at the bottom and they're hard to carve. And if you use a lot less than 12, the flutes are too wide at the top. You can use an odd number instead of an even, but then you have a bit more of a layout problem since the center flute will be on the center line, instead of the center line being a cut between two flutes. An odd number will look fine, however.
Carved-fan-05.jpg
Reply With Quote