"Joiner-carved" and Painted Corbel Project

[Karl Andersson]

I just finished this small project in my house and figuredit was time someone made a new post in this carving forum, so here goes:
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We’ve been steadily refurbishing every part of our house,and this hallway was the last “untouched” part. The house isn’t very wide, so the joists from a stairway infringed on the ceiling of this hallway. One was originally inside a wall, and the thicker one was made part of some strange, visible ceiling/ wall joint thing over the parallel stairway going downstairs. After doing some “joiner-style” carving on a box, I decided it would be a good way to make a decorative touch on these corbel-like spaces.
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If you’re going to do this style of carving with a limited number of chisels and gouges, the first thing I recommend is that you make a “radius board” from the gouges you have. I did this by pressing the gouges into a scrap board at 90 degrees to the board and following the circumference around until it made a circle – then running a sharp pencil in the cut so I could see it, followed by marking which chisel made the circle. With these circles, I then set my compass and developed the design on the first piece of wood, based on some sketches I had done. Apologies to Peter Follansbee who insists on not using a pencil, but I didn’t want compass scratches all over my soft wood and the pieces are so small there’s little room for error.
The wood I used was just BORG #2 white wood – I chose a piece that had enough space between knots to get clean corbels and didn’t have any sap pockets, center rings, warps or checks. It did take a bit of looking for the right board.
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Cutting this soft wood is easy, but you need to have very sharp tools, re-stropped often, to get clean cuts without soft grain crushing, especially in direct cross-grain cuts. I only used the mallet for v-tool work –the rest was done with hand pressure. The v-tool should probably be used first to define straight lines, flowing curves,etc. – doing it first protects the edges of the flowers and other “tool cut”carvings from random cuts with the v-tool or snagging on your sleeve and chipping off (it happens). I did it both ways on the first piece, but did v-work first on subsequent ones.
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Most of this “joiner-style” carving relies on tool cuts for the outlines of the details. It isn’t really carving as much as it is making simple cut shapes align into a design, then carving out around it to make a relief -a better name for this traditional decorative carving style might be “tool mark carving”.
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The flowers/ medallions were the most enjoyable part,figuring out how to combine v-tool and gouge marks to make different shapes. I studied a lot of antique furniture and P. Follansbees’s designs online and also made up a few of my own before settling on a final series. If you look closely, you’ll see each corbel has one unique flower not shared on the others. This started when I had a chip-out on one while carving the second corbel, so I had to adapt to the different shape, then I thought it was interesting enough to keep doing it.
Cont'd

[Karl Andersson]

Continued from above:
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These designs are considerably smaller than the ones on a joined chest, so I did use some very small palm gouges to do the grounding work in places. Notice how the flowers are roughly dish-shaped with a shallow gouge before carving – this makes straight cuts on the petals appear to taper towards the center. I did photograph the carving cuts in 3-4 stages for each flower, if anyone is interested and wants to see how they were done.
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Once all the corbels were done and cleaned up from splinters, tear-out, etc, I stained them with minwax stain prior to my wife painting them. This just darkens the cuts and creases so they’re not white when done. As most of these original carvings were painted – and because we wanted little islands of color in an otherwise drab hallway, my wife then used artist’s acrylic paint to color them and I made mouldings to bridge the joists. The mouldings were stained and then both the mouldings and painted corbels were coated with semigloss water-based poly that had burnt sienna artist’s paint mixed in with it. The original mouldings in the house were all varnished and it has darkened considerably; I find using colored varnish over stain is the best way to match the effect.
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So, here is the finished project with the corbels and trim drilled and finish-nailed to the joists. I made the deep ¾ round moulded edge by using an antique 3/8 in radius edge bead moulding plane, first on the face of the board, then the edge so the profiles intersect and make a rod-like standing bead that looks nice and substantial since this is supposed to be a structural member. Notice how the darkened varnish lightly accentuates the carvings and adds some depth and age to them.
Hope you enjoyed the pics, please let me know if you have any questions
Karl

[mike holden]

That is really nice. The coloring really makes the project stand out. Lovely.

[Mel Fulks]

Love the idea, the return bead unifying moulding, carving ,and colors. The only loser is the framed prints, lost in the myriad blaze....may I suggest some Dayglow posters? And that looks like an unusually good yellow on the walls,so many of them seem either greenish or to mustardy.

[Joe Butler]

That is some fine work. . .JoeB

[Karl Andersson]

Dayglow posters, niiiiice. I'll see if I have any in my highschool memories box (the velvet one of the skeleton riding a chopper would be especially poignant). Yeah, we had to spend a lot of time in the paint section looking for just the right wall color - this one is pretty much a tan with some Naples Yellow cast to it. It throws shadows well in the stucco - like you said, no greening. The framed art, by the way, is some Chinese embroidery with a lot of dimension to it (one is of two very bizarre-looking bats), so they're not too overshadowed detail-wise, although I'm not sure about their blue/green/silver color scheme going with the rest of it. Uh oh, interior decorator moment... time to go de-rust an iron bench vise or something more macho.

As for the carvings, I guess my main point is that this type of carving is very enjoyable and really fairly easy to do - and minor errors in layout, slight differences in shapes, etc. actually make it look more natural to the eye. If you want to do more carving on your woodwork, I recommend you start with some of these foliate designs - once you've got the hang of these simpler carvings, you'll see that it's really close to the blocking in phase of more finished/ formal carving - you could smooth these shapes to get more formal, naturalistic leaves and you'd know which of your tools to use for each detail. I just get a kick out of combining the cuts straight from the tool into geometric and naturalistic patterns...kind of like a Spirograph for those groovy enough to remember. And it's a lot faster than acanthus leaves.
Thanks for the comments,
Karl