Carving a Wee Lamb

We were hired to fabricate a lamp sculpture for Founding Farmers, a whole-food, organic restaurant, in Washington, DC. It resides near the White House and caters to the health-conscious segment of the political crowd. The sculpture serves as a mascot that warms up the sparsely decorated eatery and adds folksy ambiance to the dining area.

Mark Yearwood, the owner of Yearwood Signs (Oklahoma City), fabricated the restaurant’s signage and contracted us to fabricate the sculpture. Like us, Mark is a veteran of many Letterhead meets, and he was familiar with our work.

The client insisted the sculpture be made of wood. I chose bass wood because it’s a softer wood that shows detail very well. Also, it would mesh well with the antique finish I envisioned for the piece.

Animal magnetism

I began my process by drawing a paper pattern to scale. For reference, I downloaded online photos and altered them with Adobe Photoshop® and Gerber Scientific Products’ Omega® software to match the angle and profile I needed. When carving in full dimension, you need various angles – both sides, front, back, top and bottom. The pattern helped me determine the size of the wood block that I would sculpt. But, as you’ll see, much of the sculpture “appears” as the carving progresses.

I ordered the bass wood from the saw mill as three panels, which required lamination into one large block. The individual panels measured 24 x 14 x 4 in. After lamination, the panels spanned 24 x 14 x 12 in. I used carpenter’s glue and epoxy to laminate the panels, then secured them by applying even pressure with bar clamps.

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I then transferred the pattern to the large wood slab. I would later individually carve legs and attach them with epoxy and double-ended screws. To fabricate the head, I formed an additional piece of wood from material cut from the original slab. To create a fuller, lifelike shape for the lamb, I added chipped material for extra padding.

Tool time

Then, the fun began. Chainsaw art at its finest! Actually, at this point, it’s the perfect tool for cutting away excess wood because I’m not looking for detail. We simply wanted to rough out the shape. I used a 16-in. Mastercraft electric chainsaw and a 12-in., timber-framing notcher.

After I’d roughed out the profile, I arranged our tools: grinders, a sharp axe, chisels and a wood mallet. With our grinder, I used several disc attachments. A chainsaw wheel removed lots of material quickly, and, to remove material more smoothly, we used a coarse-wheel attachment.

Then, we simply continued the roughing-out process, which included rounding out the back and hips. The lamb took shape as I ground, chopped and carved, which eliminated all the pieces that weren’t “sheepish.” The indispensible axe made quick work of rounding the lamb’s body.

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To chip away at the lamb’s head and other fine details, I used a 2½-in.-wide, Stubai fishtail gouge. Nöella held the gouge firmly and chipped away at the lamb’s head. Remove small amounts of material and work your way slowly around the entire sculpture. This way, you’ll prevent removing too much material from one place. It’s not impossible, but it would be difficult to to add material once the wood has been carved.

Initially, I traced the profile of the lamb on the wood – in this case the lamb is symmetrical, so I used the same pattern on both sides. Once the wood is roughed to the pattern, I continued to draw the lamb’s details, such as the ear and the neckline, by hand.

Then, the lamb truly began to take shape. Using the gouge, we contoured the hip and defined the tail area and the musculature of its front legs, as well as the curve of the back leading to the head. We shaped these details similarly to the body – we worked slowly and chipped away wood until the legs “appeared.”

It’s very important not to carve everything to size at this stage. We laminated the legs and ears to the body first, and then carved the lamb’s form in one piece. This ensured continuous chisel marks that flowed from all sections. The joints were imperceptible, but, initially, it’s important to maintain extra surface area to make the lamination solid. We sanded the surface smooth with coarse-grit sandpaper and progressed to fine, 200-grit paper. Next, Noëlla used the gouge to impart fine detail into the “wool.”

After lamination, we continued to chip away until satisfied with the sculpture’s shape. On the face, Noëlla accentuated the mask created by the wool “growing” on the lamb. We sanded and smoothed the whole surface prior to adding the texture.

The fine points

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Now, we reached the final-detailing stage. We needed to decide whether to make the sculpture’s surface resemble real wool, or to render what might be called a more folk-art interpretation. Personally, I love the rough texture that the gouge leaves behind and chose to allow that to define its texture. So, we chose folk art.

Noëlla made one more pass along every inch of the wood’s surface to impart additional, rough texture. At this point, we envisioned the finish and could anticipate the sculpture’s final appearance.

To create the appropriate textured surface, a mallet wasn’t necessary, but a sharp gouge proved key. The tool holds its edge much longer when carving wood, rather than HDU, because urethane’s grit dulls a chisel quickly. However, I still returned to the sharpening grind roughly once an hour. A sharp gouge should flow across bass wood like butter.

To finish our sculpture, we simply primed the lamb with one coat of white, water-based primer, which we followed with two coats of off-white, exterior, latex paint. To perfect the folk-art look after we’d finished painting, we sanded the surface with fine-grit sandpaper to remove paint from the surface and accentuate the chisel marks. When completed, our little lamb looked like it could have been sculpted generations ago.

The faint of heart should avoid this type of carving; it’s time-consuming and requires physical strength. We logged approximately 40 hours of labor carving this lamb.

The successful project inspired Founding Farmers’ owner to commission another project. Now, our little lamb has another companion from Sign-It – this time, a piglet went to Washington.

Equipment and Materials

Adhesive: Two-part epoxy, from West System Inc. (Bay City, MI), (866) 937-8797 or www.westsystem.com; carpenters’ glue, available from home-improvement and building-supply stores.

Coatings: Waterbased primer, from Kilz (Imperial, MO), (866) 774-6371 or www.kilz.com; latex paint, from Sherwin-Williams (Cleveland), available at home-improvement and building-supply stores.

Software: Photoshop®, from Adobe Corp. (San Jose, CA), (800) 833-6687 or www.adobe.com; Omega®, from Gerber Scientific Products Inc. (South Windsor, CT), (800) 222-7446 or www.gspinc.com

Substrate: Bass wood panels, available from lumber distributors.

Tools: Stubai 2½-in. gouge, from Stubai Tooling (Innsbruck, Austria), (43) 5225-6960 or www.stubai.com; Mastercraft 16-in., electric chainsaw, from Canadian Tire Corp. (Toronto), (800) 387-8803 or www.canadiantire.ca; and wood mallet, rotary grinder, axe and sandpaper, available at hardware or home-improvement stores.

More About Nancy and Noëlla

Nancy Beaudette and her partner, Noëlla Cotnam, have operated Sign-It Signs since 1982, when they first fabrication signs in a 100-sq.-ft room. Five years later, they upgraded to an 1,800-sq.-ft. shop in an old lumberyard. In 1997, they moved into a 5,000-sq.-ft. facility in a Cornwall, ON, Canada industrial park.

In 2007, Nancy and Noëlla again transitioned Sign-It into their dream shop – a timber-frame structure on their home property. Although the building where Sign-It plies its trade has changed, its mission and motivation haven’t. Noëlla said:

“Every day, I look skyward and see a multitude of possibilities. Bravery is having the courage to believe in yourself and the strength of heart to venture out and persevere. Luck is when someone else reaches out to you and invites you to try something new – something you’ve always wanted and wished for. I believe intention is a wish made concrete by the power of seeing it and living every moment as if that wish was already made real. Revamping our business has been personally and professionally challenging, but I strive to be a fountain of enthusiasm and can-do attitude every day.

Perhaps the most important asset in our arsenal is our understanding of design. This happens by choosing to be the best at what we do. We constantly watch and learn from our peers and friends, as well as architecture, engineering and other arenas of creative design and construction. Whether it’s a the crunch of titanium to build a Frank Gehry building, the line and curvature of a Staten Island suspension bridge, or the way light reflects off water dripping from a rusted, page-wire fence, I let many sources of inspiration inspire my creative flame. Every signshop should set itself apart from its competitors. Never stop at the safe and familiar; always look for new answers.”

 

10 After 40 hours of demanding labor, Sign-It masterfully sculpted the lamb, which now sits proudly in Founding Farmers’ front lobby. It takes a village to raise a child, and an intricate hand-carving project requires a shelf full of tools – an ax, mallet, rotary grinder, gouge, mallet and chisel, among others. Sign-It Signs’ Nancy Beaudette and Noëlla Cotnam used their signmaking skills to intricately carve a lamb for Founding Farmers, a whole-food, Washington D.C.-based restaurant. To laminate three basswood panels into one to carve the sculpture, Sign-It laminated the slabs with carpenter’s glue and epoxy, then secured them with bar clamps. Noëlla makes quick work of the gouging out “sheepish” features with a Stubai gouge. A close-up of the lamb’s face highlights the rough, “folk art” texture of Noëlla’s sculpting. Sign-It used a similar process to produce a porcine sculpture that later joined the lamb.