Wood and stone carvings Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Wood and stone carvings - Essay Example Other traditional and cultural use of wood artistically include making of decoys as well as fish carvings. These are common across cultures. Cultural Due to woods lightness and ability to take very fine details, it is very suitable for sculpting marks and other ornaments that can be worn by people. Moreover, wood is much easier to sculpt than stone and is cheaper. As discussed by Sayers, C. M. (2012) various methods and techniques exist for wood sculpting. These include: chip curving, relief carving, caricature, whittling, treen and lovespoon and Scandinavian flat plane among others. Techniques involved on the other hand include use of tools like V tool, curving knives, veiner, chisel, gouge, copping saw etcetera. These tools are used in different methods to come up with the beautiful artistic and cultural sculptures that are used by diverse societies. The carvings could also be colored, or sealed to protect the wood from moisture and dirt. Shuman, A. (2015) discuses stone carving as amongst the ancient activities that involved use of stone to make ornamental sculptures. Stone works created during the prehistoric periods are in existent to date owing to the materials. Stone carvings in the early days were done through use of hard stones to scratch the softer ones in to shape. However, the discovery of iron has made it possible for manufactory of tools like chisels that can now be used to achieve the desired shapes even more easily. This process commences with selection of stones that are suitable for curving. The stone can be an inspiration for the object curved out of it while in some cases some artist would be having idea I the mind and look out for the best stone. Large portions are then knocked off the stone and then a chisel is brought in to action to shape the intended statue. The final product is then smoothen and its shaped enhanced with rasps and rifflers. Li, X. H. (2011) explains that stones have been used for