More on Power Tools

I don't like them and don't like the one I bought. They're noisy, crude and clunky to hold. I much prefer using hand tools and would use the rotary tool only for initial roughing out. Even then it takes quite a bit of delicacy and skill not to gouge out too much of the unwanted material.

To date, I've three unfinished netsuke on my desk, but much of my free time this past six months has been taken up with family illness and I've been making things I can more easily take around with me - Hardanger embroidery, designing and knitting a Shetland shawl and christening robe and a fabric construction.

I also invested some pennies in a couple of contemporary cheap Chinese netsuke, just to see how awful the carving and finishing was. They're pretty dire. The subject matter is uninspiring in a cheap knock-off kind of way, the finish is a gritty varnish, the carving is as minimal and slap-happy as it's possible to get and the himotoshi are a joke. As for the "signatures," don't get me started! What a waste of good boxwood! Why people buy these things for decoration, I'll never understand, but buying them for studying is a good lesson in what not to do. In that regard, it was money well spent, though I certainly shan't be buying any more.

Power Tools

I finally succumbed and bought a cheap, unbranded rotary tool, more out of curiosity than anything else. I'll buy an expensive one if I take to using them. So far, the only use I can see for it is for roughing out a design; it takes some of the drudgery out of the basic work. I certainly wouldn't use it for detailed work and I'm not enamoured of the noise, the vibrations or of the nonsense with masks and dust collection; they interfere with the almost contemplative process of making a netsuke entirely by hand. All in all, I still have doubts about its use, though I know that the old Japanese carvers used bow-string operated drills and suchlike from time to time.

It comes with a useful range of drills and abrasive bits and pieces that can always be used as hand pieces if I decide not to go the mechanical way.

If it is going to be used, there are certain necessary precautions to be taken. Well-fitting face-masks are essential; silicosis is not an option in my life. It's important to practice on spare pieces of wood for quite a while before using it on a piece for completion; it takes time to get used to the speed and rhythm of the tool and use it with a delicate, controlled touch. It's also essential to hold the piece in either a small table vice or a hand vice; you'd be surprised at how much in the intitial stages of learning the tool slips. Gouging through a hand with one of these things wouldn't be much fun. After turning off the tool, don't touch it to change bits, or lay it down on the workbench until the chuck has stopped spinning and be aware that the chuck can get hot.

Re-reading this list of caveats, I'm beginning to wonder quite why I bothered buying it. Maybe my attitude will change with time and familiarity, though.

Next Step - Citrus

The basic design has been blocked out in ink. Here, I'm following
a number of drawings that are really studies of dried clementines and lemons. Mostly clementines don't have pips, though I've found some that did, and as I want to imitate the clementine shape and outer colours, I've mostly studied those. Both shape and colours are fairly complex, so it'll be another test to see if I can make my drawing concrete.

The dried fruit shows many indentations on the surface, so the cross-hatching in the design will be where this takes place. The vertical lines indicate where the fruit has dried along the edges of its sections; these show deeper indentations than the part which will show the sections of the fruit. The arrangement of pips will show some cut in half and others whole.

Tools I'm using at the moment? Some mini-gouges, tiny knives and scrapers. All had to be made and I might have to make one or two more curved ones to get into small, skewed recesses.

Half a Citrus

This is in boxwood - much easier to carve than tagua, knots and ridges notwithstanding. This wood is much used by netsuke carvers because its hardness and fine grain holds small, carved details very well.

I'm using some dried limes, lemons and clementines for live models, as can be seen on my carving slab, some photos for the inner parts and some drawings of tricky parts. It will be worked all over with texture, which will make it quite rough in the hand; if all goes well there won't be any smooth, polished part.

The staining will be time-consuming as there are so many variations across the outer peel and the inner 'flesh' and pips. The himotoshi will be formed from the bent stem at the bottom of the netsuke. The dimensions will be roughly 3.8mm x 2.5mm.

I'll try to take photos at various stages on development, so something can be seen of the processes involved. The current one shows the wood rough with the sections of the fruit and pips drawn in and some shaping to the underside. Beside it are the various dried fruits themselves. I'll be following the Clementine shaping of the dried example reasonably closely, though with some modifications.

Wasps' Nest

I've finished the tagua nut sliver which was started about June 2009. It's really just an experiment in high-gloss polishing and bas-relief work with what is essentially a flat plane across the tree and nest and isn't meant to be a netsuke, though it originally was. It's very tactile and feels good in the palm of the hand. I followed the design in the nut when I cut it across and 'found' the rough shape of the nest within, though I did some drawings before carving. The nut will darken to a honey brown over time, so the bark of the tree will be more distinct and the cracks on the bark will fill with dirt, making them more obvious. The stain on the nest and leaf will also correspondingly darken.

Originally, the back of the design was going to have himotoshi, an incised beehive and my initials, but after practicing incising on spare pieces of nut, the material really isn't suitable for it in very small detail, as all such incised work on tagua tends to have rough edges and background and looks crude. I then decided that I liked the feel of the polished tagua as is, so following my original thoughts of letting the nut dictate the outcome, I decided further to leave out the himotoshi and initials. So it's now really a one-dimensional, hand-held, relief miniature. Another instance of how the design can be changed in the making to one more suitable to the material! It's also another lesson learned - don't attempt to push the material too much beyond the limits of what it can do.

Tagua's really nasty for carving fine details because it has a tendency to chip and I don't generally find it to be a sympathetic medium, so am glad to get back to carving boxwood. When hard, the nut has a grain, which is laid down in layers as the tagua has dried. Working along the grain causes tools to slip and skid as the surface is like very hard candle wax; working across the grain can cause chipping, so only really tiny tools, much magnification and hours of scraping will overcome this tendency. It'll be a long time before I work the material again.

Tagua, wasps' nest, angled sliver from 3/16th" on the smooth, highly polished side to 1/2" on the matt 'tree' side, with the nest, twigs and leaf being a little polished; no detail on the reverse, just highly polished. Overall dimensions, just under 2" x 1 1/4". Very light staining on nest and leaf; turmeric and saffron on nest; turmeric, paprika and white tea on leaf; mordant for stain - alum. No acid mordant used for tagua, as a practice piece showed some disintegration of the nut surface; polishing papers up to 12,000 grit.