Beaver mask with human face mask, in progress
Posted by Nigel in Northwest Coast Art, tags: beaver, Bill McLennan, Charles Edenshaw, Frog bowl, Haida, mask, sketchWell, it’s back to normal, back from school and back to the grind. I have been looking at materials local to Topley that I may use for carving. One of the woods that I have checked out is aspen wood. It seems that aspen is solid enough to carve and it finishes very similar to alder. I am going to look into using birch wood, too. I have heard that birch is quite dense and i wonder how easy it would be to carve.
I am currently working on an alder beaver mask. I hope to be done this soon.
I also have been doing some study sketches of some of the images in my textbooks. The source for the sketch above was from page 97 of the “Transforming Image” textbook [McLennan]. It is of a Haida frog bowl, attributed to Charles Edenshaw.