Wood used for carving

Seeking to create a piece of art a carver, first of all, chooses material – wood. Therefore he should know properties of wood: hardness, shock and pressure resistance, its colour, he should know that all the shades of wood, however different and contrast they may be, are always in harmony, so if one changes its colour the warm colour of natural wood will be in dissonance. Such carved piece would look tasteless and would not have any esthetic value.

For fine piece of work one should choose biologically mature and slowly dried trunks cut long ago. A trunk of wood consists of pitch, heartwood, sapwood and bark.

The wood has fibrous structure. One may distinguish three main cuts: cross-section – across the fibers, radial – along the axis of the trunk and tangential – when the plane goes along the trunk at any distance from the axis. Some types of wood are light and called sapwood. Darker central part of other types of wood is closer to the center and is called ripewood. The first ones include: birch, alder, lime, maple, pear, etc. The following of the second type should be mentioned: pine, cedar, oak, ash, cade. A carver should know that wood capillaries are full of resins, tannins and other substances; therefore it does not readily absorb dying substances, lacquers and glues.

By hardness all the types of wood are divided into soft ones – pine, fir, cedar, cade, poplar, lime, aspen, chestnut and hard ones – birch, beech, oak, ash, elm, witchen, maple, apple tree, etc.

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