It has long been customary to decorate your home and household items with various ornaments. The most practical material for this was wood. Our ancestors revealed many advantages when working with wood. The main one is convenience and ease of processing. In the modern world, wood products also remain popular, and made by hands are of great value. A fairly common technique for woodcarving is flat-relief, and its advantage is that everyone can master it.
Features and types
The carved nature of flat-relief carvings is a depression or bulging of the background by about 5-7 mm around the ornament. Due to this, the image becomes three-dimensional and preserves the height of the relief parts, having one background depth. The sketch is based on various images of animals, birds, plants, humans. You can also work out even the smallest details. Often with such patterns decorate dishes, household items, furniture, balusters.
When performing this technique, it is customary to distinguish the types of technology:
- with a voiced background;
- with selected contour;
- with a pillow background;
- with selected and underlined background.
It is extremely difficult to distinguish techniques from each other, since woodcarving is characterized by a planar image. It often happens that all kinds are intertwined in one composition.
Tools and material
Advice for beginners in flat-necked carving - it is better to choose a tree of soft breed. These include: aspen, linden, pine. More experienced carvers use hard wood: beech, walnut, acacia, hornbeam.
To perform this type of thread, prepare the tools:
- files;
- electric drill;
- ruler;
- a planer with a jigsaw;
- jamb knife with a hacksaw;
- chisel;
- compass and eraser.
Execution technology
First prepared thread material. The wood should be flat, planed and cleaned with sandpaper. If the background is light, then it is treated with a jointer, and the dark is painted over. The ornament for the manufacture is selected from specialized books, albums, magazines, and for accurate performance, tracing paper or a carbon paper is used. For beginners, it is better to use a sketch applied directly to the workpiece itself.
A jamb knife is the most important tool for a wood carver.. When working, he is held tightly in his hand, guiding the blade to his side, and with a little pressure they remove the ornament. The knife should be inclined. After the cut is made, the cutting itself is done. All rounding is done at one corner of the chisel, with the right blade width. For a product with a stuck thread, you will first need to make a workpiece, and the process itself begins with cutting the background. In the future, it is rounded off.
All sections are produced only with semicircular chisels. It is very important to withstand 30 degrees of slope.
The technology of threading with a pillow background is similar to the first view. It differs from the stale technique only in that the contour is slightly lower than the pattern itself. Accordingly, the amount of work when performing such a thread is much larger. Suitable for more experienced craftsmen. At the end of the work, sanding is carried out with sandpaper or fine sandpaper. Beginners should start with a thread with a selected contour. Such a thread is considered easier to perform, because the contour is removed at an angle of 30-45 degrees of inclination to the plane. No further grinding is required.
When performing a technique with an underlined or selected background, the difference from the other types is that a recess is made in a circle from the main drawing, and the image seems to rise above the base.
Drawings with a selected background are used in the manufacture of volumetric wooden compositions. At the end of the work, the product is tinted using various stains or dyes. Then polished with sandpaper. Can be coated with colorless varnish.
Flat-necked threads in production are performed on special CNC machines. In turn, the technology of the machine can also be divided into 2 types.
- Body thread: the background of the thread is 4-5 mm lower from the top of the workpiece, and the wall is cut by a 30-60 degree cutter. The remaining lines of the picture and the decorative part are cut 90-120 degree cutter. This type is shown in the image of an owl in flight.
- Carved flat-necked thread. With this method, the main background is cut directly at a right angle, and the outer wall of the thread is cut in half or in a small part using a 30-60 degree cutter. The appearance of such a technique is depicted on a stand.
Despite the ease of performing work on the machine, some technical rules should be followed. One of the main ones is observing the dimensions of the drawing and the milling cutters suitable for it, so that when cutting the background, use as few milling cutters as possible and significantly reduce the time required to replace the working tool. Also, when forming a picture, one should observe the structure of the composition, its logic and completeness. Weave must be strictly observed. To facilitate the work, you can use the sketch, drawn by hand, and display it through the program CorelDraw.
You can watch flat-carved woodcarvings in the video below.
