The 'Why'
Ever since working with live edge slabs, myself and my team have noticed that the undulations in the live edge of a slab, if you oriented on its side, lend themselves to landscapes or mountains. There's a beautiful depth, shadowing, and shading effect that can happen with the slope of the live edge that makes them look like mountain tops and hills ranges and so on.
From the beginning of when Woodlab formed, we always wanted to start doing a lot more artwork using the epoxy and the wood as a new medium. So we started to evolve the craft, our expertise, what we know about doing epoxy pours with live edge slabs. We're starting to create what we feel are realistic landscapes, sunsets, and various different things that is an impressionist piece of art from something that is seen in nature.
We plan to do a series of landscape art pieces that are notable areas within the state, such as the Sawtooth mountains as depicted here (west side of the Tetons looking from Idaho towards them). This is an example of taking the sculpture of slabs, finding a live edge that might be similar to a mountain scape, such as the Tetons, and then sculpting into it in sort of a 3-D format. Various ranges, front ranges, that might be in front of the mountains, lake areas or trees, and then using the epoxy to add depth, shadowing, perspective as such into various art pieces.
From what we know and can find, having been one of the original people that's been in the epoxy wood or artistic movement, there really isn't anyone else or any other shop that's doing large landscape pieces like this that's the blend of the epoxy and wood.
The 'How'
In this particular art piece, we start with a slab and its natural live edge. We sculpt the top mountain range, the front foothill range, and then we sculpt the river and the foreground. We then work to layer in colors in the sky, in the river, in other sections, which some of the sections are natural voids that are found in the slab. We even have elements of the art piece that are proud of the slab or proud of the epoxy, such as three layers of a burrowed veneer that we laser etch and sculpt and then paint in order to layer of Forest element or maybe a foreground bush element, the clouds themselves also are separately poured individually and then as we're layering the sky with very shades of blue,we set those clouds in there and then pour an additional number of layers of white or peal epoxy in order to get that nicely filtered look and wispy look in the sky.
This particular piece took us six months to make!
- Selection of the slab
- Composition from a photograph; what stain colors to choose in certain areas. We had to stain the mountains to capture the sunlight, shading as the sun hits the various undulations in the valleys and in the foothills.
- 31 different pores; each pore can take upwards of three days to cure, so it's quite a long process. This ensures that the colors that come out overtime, and through all those layerings, really do match the comp that we created originally.