Late Geologic Series

The precision of my carving continued to evolve. I learned many lessons about carving leather-hard pieces over the years, the most important of which was to carve the bottom ledge first instead of last. You can see that the edges of these ledge pieces are well defined, clear and sharp. I would go through several tools with each piece and have to sharpen them constantly. There are up to 60-plus hours of carving in each of these pieces. The larger they were the more chance there was of them cracking in the firing. The loss rate was usually 20%-30%.