Thursday, January 12, 2012

Carvings Realistic Eyes

The question of the day:  CAN AN OLD DOG LEARN NEW TRICKS?
And the jury is still out on this question as it relates to me learning to carve realistic eyes.
Here's the problem.  This Ol' dog has spent six years whittling.  When I started someone told me that I need to practice, practice, practice.  This I took to heart,  This might have been the only time in my life that I actually followed instructions.  I started carving faces, Santa faces.  I carved lots of them.  I practiced, practiced, and practiced carving faces.  I got it down so that I could carve them in no time at all.  I've carved at least two Santa pins every day for the past several years.  The eyes on these faces were an after thought, and were mainly half carved and then painted.  Or they were left squinting.  I have just learned that to carve realistic eyes I must alter the way that I roughed out the eye area.  This means relearning how to rough out the eye area.  I have to "unlearn" my old methods, before I can learn the new methods.  There is an old saying................"we cannot plant new crops without first uprooting the old roots and giving the new seeds a chance, we need to unlearn before we can learn anew".  Unlearning is the key. How then do we unlearn our patterns and develop new patterns?

You see my problem?

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