I was asked by Eibe Play Ltd to carve six oak panels for a play area in Alice Holt Forest in Surrey, all with a woodland fairy/elf theme; we’d had several discussions initially about me perhaps carving some large logs from home, which would then be transported to Surrey and then set in the ground at the play area ~ and this was the basis for this fantastic promotional film from Eibe : https://vimeo.com/146232653 , which cleverly superimposes some images of past carvings on to trunks to give a sense of the finished look.
It was soon agreed that to carve and fix panels to existing stumps on site would be the best thing to do, and I ordered six panels of oak, each 800mm x 500mm x 75mm and got to work.
I had to flatten each panel with an electric hand planer as there was a certain amount of “cupping”, and no-one I know has a thicknesser to cope with timber this size. Then it was the usual process of tracing my designs on the oak and chipping away.
I was working to a completion date of the end of April, so the pressure was on!
Leveling the background on the last panel.
A small concern was how to package the panels, as I didn’t want them arriving in Surrey with a nose missing; luckily I happened upon a listing on Gumtree’s “Freebie” section, where a chap was getting rid of a number of boxes of large bubble wrap, which was perfect. What luck! It took nearly as long to package the panels as it did to carve them.
The finished panels:
Photos of the individual panels, with close-ups, will appear on the gallery pages shortly.