Okay, I've started the carved plaque for my beautiful bride's anniversary gift. It isn't perfect, but for my first crack I'm pretty well pleased. Wolf, I didn't take your suggestion of painting and then carving through. It's a beautiful look, but to my eye it looks a little too country for my wife's style. I did on the other hand take your advice on honing with the ceramic stone. It's hard to judge without having anything to baseline off of, but the knife did seem to work a little easier after a couple of swipes.
Now for the questions. For the bulk of the sign, I wanted pretty big letters ("Sharp" is 1.25" tall). When I looked at normal Roman fonts, the line widths on letters that big seemed awfully wide (which would translate into deep) for an amateur to carve. I found the font you see below that incorporates some negative space to keep the max line width down, but the problem with it is the way different line widths merge and intersect. That seems like it might be a bigger challenge than just bearing down and going deep. What do y'all think?
And since I am carving on raw wood, I'm still undecided on final finish. My thoughts are to either in-paint the letters with a dark color, sand the surface to get rid of any slop, then clearcoat, or just clearcoat then wax with a dark wax to highlight the carving. Opinions?
Thanks again for all the great advice, with your help I'm going to lick this whole letter carving thing yet.
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