Painted Red Oak Bowl
Richard Allen
>Hi
This bowl is 18"x5" out of the Red Oak tree that hurricane Isabel crashed onto my home a year ago. I processed two log sections into 18 bowls. I have the largest two yet to finish turn.
I left this bowl quite thick when I roughed it and even though there was the usual ovaling I was able to keep a 1 1/4" thickness to the rim. The wall thins down to 3/8", this bowl is heavy to pickup. I wanted to provide some security when using the bowl so I put a deep groove on the outside. Mostly for assistance in handling the bowl. Well the groove looked pretty bad and after a week I decided I needed to do something about it.
I considered many different decorations, metal leaf, colored epoxy filler, texturing... The idea of burning and coloring appealed to me. I had just received my burning and coloring supplies from a friend who I had collaborated on a platter with. She had done a wonderful job and I wanted to do something similar. The deep groove reminded me of a constriction. I thought of tying a piece of leather in that grove and hanging some "stuff" from the leather. Then I thought a vine might constrict. There are lots of vines and I considered several. I like the look of green on reddish wood so a green leaf vine would be good. As I started to draw I was reminded of the poison ivy which had grown on that tree. So I started making leaves of three. This was in the pencil stage. I thought some berries or flowers would look nice to go along with the leaves. So I looked up poison ivy on the web. The spring colors of poison ivy jumped out at me as the shape and color I wanted.
As I was penciling in the leaves coming out of the groove I was reminded that I was not limited to round. The ivy could go anywhere. I thought a little spiral of the vine trailing to the bottom of the bowl would be nice.
This is my first attempt at coloring on my turnings. It took a long time to pencil, burn and color the bowl. But the time was "sit in front of the TV time", so it passed quickly.
Thanks
Richard
