[doris]

hi fred, nice to hear from you :-) ... yes, finishing is nightmare to me too, its like playing roulette, it seems ... i do so many testpieces before apply finish to a carving, and most of time, the carving turns out different from every test piece i did...mary poppins is a good example, her umbrella is carved from the same wood, the block cut directly besides that which mary is made of, i made exactely same finish,ut them side by side and did everthing equal, and yet, umbrella, and mary are completely different turned out... would you like explain in more detail, how your way of finishing is ? or just some more hints, that give ideas for own experiments, please ?...

[Alice in Wonderland]

Doris it turned out just beautiful I just love your work and admire you for doing relief.With the finishing ,do not get upset, you are dealing with Nature and it will fool you time and time again , leaving Wood naturel you have to expect suprises unless you "fool it" lol
Alice

[Fred Zavadil]

Hi Doris,
This is Hana, once again at the computer with Fred - it is hard to get both of us here, this is why he does not reply too often, he needs to tell me what to write and I type.
As Alice says, it is Nature we are dealing with and the results are sometimes not what we expect. It took me a long time to figure out what to do and still, sometimes it just does not work the way I would like it to. There are tricks and hints, that is for sure, one of them for me is the preparation of wood for the final finish - I put the way which works for me in another thread, here is the link Cleaning carving prior to painting. The staining and painting is a different story; when I use the stain or paint on prepared carving, I use a cloth to wipe or add it where I need, mind you with the stain you have to work fast even on sealed wood. From your website I know that you are a very good painter, it means you have for sure experience with oil paints, these are what I use for painting, again, I use cloth to wipe the excess paint and because they take longer time to dry, they allow me to play with the shades more than acrylic. There are no other secrets, it is just a process I learned experimenting when I was trying to find what I would like. It will probably not work on everything, I use this method on basswood.
If you have any question when you work on your next carving, just let me know, I will try to explain more - even though, the best way is to experiment.
Fred (and Hana)

[doris]

thanks alice, hana and fred :-) ...yes, nature is difficult to deal with you are so right, but if we succeed to do to bring out the natural beauty together with our carving, that is wonderful, and worth the effort... thank you so much fred for the insight how you do finishes, this gives me a new way to try to see what works for me... and, no, i am not familiar with oil paints, or any real paints in fact, the paintings you saw on my webpage are all digital paintings, no paint, no mess, just bits and bytes...the only real medium i am skilled to use is pencil, the drawings on my homepage are made in pencil, and fotographed, all other is digital... anyway, thanks fred for advise. and thank you hana, for lending fred your hand to communicate with us. i do appreciate very much.......a friend saw this carving first time yesterday, and just stood there and admired and said beautiful...was not even noticing the seam, this made me happy ... :-)