Grounding the Relief, Cont'd.

Now the carving is completely outlined, and I'm ready to start removing wood:

I remove the wood using some of the same techniques I use in paring dovetails - successive, deeper cuts that result in a pyramid shape when working a square (or roughly square) area, or when it is a wider area, a "ridge" is left in the middle.  Carving works best when used parallel with the grain.  It would be best if you could work with the grain in all situations, like seems to be shown in most of the books on carving (whether they say so or not), but I have yet to find a piece of wood where the grain will always be in favor of the direction I'm carving.  This is compounded with such a grain ignorant pattern as a celtic knot drawn in some cantankerous hickory.  But I got myself in to this, so finish it I will, come hell or high water.

Personally, I'm hoping for the high water, because wood both floats AND burns - I'd rather float...  In any case, I then remove the pyramid or ridge with a scraping, almost prying motion with the chisel.  I use older, less expensive chisels for this purpose, ground to a fairly steep angle (like 35 degrees), and keep the honing wheel running to keep the edge as sharp as possible during the process.

For long grain situations, its a bit different, but handled much the same.  One way is to make a series of cuts perpendicular to the grain at about 1" spacing, and pare it out until you have the resulting ridge mentioned above.  I have other plans for the background, though, so I go for a bit of a faster method, using a mallet with light taps in the direction that best favors how the grain is running, taking a series of small chips out until the entire length of the section I'm removing is close to finished depth.  I then go in and clean up the edges by using the gouges on the outline, and whatever chisel fits, and removing what I missed.  To bring it to finished depth, I use the widest chisel I have that will fit into the pattern drawn (in my case, an old Miller's Falls 1/4" chisel) and carefully pare the background down to finished depth.  

I don't worry about getting it perfect - like I said, I've got something else in mind. But - there are always areas where you go too far, or a chip becomes a crack - a bit of glue and some masking tape to hold the pieces together while it dries takes care of it, so long as I'm careful not to lose the piece:

I keep working on deepening the background until its all as deep as it needs to be - somewhere around 3/16" or so.  It's not important to shoot for an exact depth, so long as the result is aesthetically pleasing.

Finishing up the Carving