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carving moss (1 Viewer)

Hi len, and welcome to art forum...If you want to carve Sphagnum Moss ,its done with a rotary tool, ( Dremel )or similar...you put a small ball shaped bit in tool ,and push into the wood at different depths, they use the same technique for trees & bushes on relief carvings....mark.
 
fortunately some people on this forum actually know something, thank you Mark, I'm sure you answered the question he meant :)

I'm always thinking "out of the box" and sometimes off the planet!
 
fortunately some people on this forum actually know something, thank you Mark, I'm sure you answered the question he meant :)

I'm always thinking "out of the box" and sometimes off the planet!

Make that two of us 'off the planet.' I just couldn't figure out how or why someone would want to carve something so fragile as moss. I never would have thought about freezing it first. In any case it was quite a surprise when I saw that I'd completely misunderstood the question!
 
OH MY GOD, I am SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOo SLOW! Carve something to look like moss, not take a lump of moss and carve into it. Not just off the planet, I think I've popped into the neighbours' solar system.
 
In competitive bird carving contests here in the U.S., at least at the higher levels of competitions, all habitat materials accompanying the bird are to be made by the carver. So, if the branch or rock or whatever has lichen/moss, it should be made by the carver. To see an excellent example of this in a carving, take a look the Ruffed Grouse carving by champion Canadian carver Pat Godin at "Birch Lake" Ruffed Grouse. I don't know if Pat carved the moss or not, but I know some carvers use extrtemely fine diamond carving points in rotary handpiece tools to repeatly "jab" perpendiculary into the wood surface to get a mossy look.

If you go to my web site (Feather By Feather Bird Carvings) and look at the Gallery 1 page, you'll see my carving of a Winter Wren on a ground habitat. I made the moss out of texture paste, using an old wire brush to texture the surface as it set up so that it looked like a soft moss covering the ground. You can also see my attempt at lichens if you look closely at the small branches in front of the bird. The lichens were made from two part epoxy. The leaf was made from craft paper painted with layers of acyrilic paint and is really quite strong.

I am trying to come up with a good method to make the "Spanish Moss" lichen for a carving of a Carolina Chickadee on a branch covered with it, but have not been successful getting it the length I want.
 
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