Brian Underwood
Chumono
I worked with Jim Gremel as his apprentice over the summer, and have learned a great deal from the experience. The most recent trees we did were Coastal Redwoods (about 8 of them). This one started out as a boring, strait, single trunk collected tree, which is the way you find them most of the time. This is not the ideal collecting material because, as I said before, its boring. In order to try to create some interest, we decided to hollow the whole tree out, like those burned in forest fires. It took a few hours to empty the poor tree of most of it's wood, and do a little detail carving on the edges. We let it rest and dry out for a month, and in that time it grew quite a few new branches which is very promising. After it was nice and dry, we protected the live parts of the tree, and burned the whole inside (again to replicate those burned out trees in nature). A wire brush was used to take off some of the charred parts, and create a weathered look.
Overall I think it turned out pretty good. There is still a LOT of work to do in the future such as branch selection, wiring and ramification, but that will come in due time. It will also need more carving at the base when it is repotted, as it looks unnatural right now. The first pic is not the actual tree, merely a reference as to how this one looked before we started (I lost the before picture). The rest are just points along the way.
Hope you all like it! - Brian
Overall I think it turned out pretty good. There is still a LOT of work to do in the future such as branch selection, wiring and ramification, but that will come in due time. It will also need more carving at the base when it is repotted, as it looks unnatural right now. The first pic is not the actual tree, merely a reference as to how this one looked before we started (I lost the before picture). The rest are just points along the way.
Hope you all like it! - Brian