Hope Street New entrance

We are redoing our front entrance to our home.  Here is my sketch of what I'm going to build in a month or so from now.  Ink drawing, iphone took the picture, painted and edited in photoshop

Droppin the hammer

This is pretty rough and was a little rushed, but I think its great.  Its a giant hammer that's about 2 feet tall.  Made of poplar like the bulldog below.  Made it for my friend Jerry. Hysterical.

Bacon?

Yes...its a pig

How bout them dawgs?!

Made this one out of poplar.  Its one of my favorite carvings so far.

Chainsaw Bears

Well, first post in a long while, but...I have found yet another outlet for my quote, "creative outlet". Chainsaw Art. Its a little off the beaten path as far as normal outles...ie, reading books in coffee shops or watching movies whatever.
The history on this is as follows...In 07' we were at a fall festival in Elljay, GA and we were at, I wanna say the Apple Barn, and there was a guy right next store chainsawing up a bunch of bears. For about a half an hour I watched him and then grilled him on questions about it and said to myself..."i think i can do that."
The following week i went home, got a chainsaw, went into the woods and found an old fallen pine tree, cut a log section off of it and took it home. About 3 hours later a bear emerged from my old pine tree. So here it is to the right. Since that bear, I've made about two a year and just given them away as gifts.
So...with that said, this year I've taken it up a notch. Maybe there is something wrong with me, but I love trying to turn my goofy hobbies into a money making idea. Until now, that has been unsuccessful. I've put drawings up in coffee shops and tried to sell 'house portraits' to people. No bueno. But maybe a chainsaw bear will sell.
At Nellie Mae, which is our house, we have about 200' of road frontage. Being the redneck that I am, I rolled out a bunch of logs in front of my house, put a sign up and starting chainsawing up bears. I figured I might be able to sell a few, or at the very least, I can make people wonder who is the loser with the chainsaw in front of that house. To my complete and utter disbelief, I have sold 15 bears and one pig. At $75 bucks a bear, I've done pretty good for a hobby. Here are my 2012 Bear 3.0 versions to the left.
So for the time being, I am going to be posting my latest carvings, tell me what you think. I would like your feedback, ideas suggestions whatever. I'm starting to venture out into other things. I'll post my pig i did the other day soon and my failed attempt at an owl. You'll see.

Creepy

Is this image creepy? I think so. But it still looks pretty cool. The picture of the barn window came from my buddy's farm a little north-west of Canton. The creepy Tales from the crypt guy came from a picture i took at tales from the wax museum in Gatlinburg. I burned out the colors using a lomo photography effect. Next, I just cropped and distorted the picture to get the wide angle, roundish effect. I used a subtle layer mask to bring the creepy guy into the window. Thats about it.

David's Bridge

Here is my first photograph taken by me and edited in photoshop. I love black and white photos. Its funny, even looking through other peoples photo galleries, I seem to catch myself spending much longer looking at the black and white ones.
This picture was taken in color and converted to black and white. I added a levels adjustment layer to darken the corners and set the feather option to 80. Then, I adjusted the mode to Lab Color and copied the lab color channel into the layers pallet. Next I added 2 additional layers with the soft light option, added a warming photofilter and another levels adjustment layer to the whole picture and that would be a ball game. Oh yeah, there was another person on the bridge but i edited them out using the clone stamp tool....i love that tool.
I'm not sure i will go into this much detail for other photos, but its my first one and my blog there you have it.