It was just recently that a browse through the various woodturning videos on youtube that I discovered Andy's "Colouring an Ash Bowl" tutorial, I was so impressed, and indeed, inspired, I was definately going to try this, I thought the green vase seen in the video looked fantastic and wanted to produce something along similar lines.
Having only recently acquire a new jet 1642 many previously impossible projects on the little coronet now became possible, among which was turning Hollow forms. I had tried one the day before and it wasn't too bad, I gave it to my sister. The next day saw me chainsawing a second log from the mid sized sycamore branch I had in the garden, it is slightly spalted and had been down for well over a year, so there is little tension left in it even if it is not quite dry.
Turning the from was again a reasonable success, it had little in the way of nice markings, being fairly plain, so I decided it was the ideal subject for a colouring.
I wanted to end up with a dark olive green and gold look, so I initially laid on an all over coat of Yellow stain, followed patches of green and the whole then overlaid with orange, the green is a bit vivid out of the bottle and the orange helps to kill it a little and mute the intensity, leaving a nice subdued forest green colour, after that I dried the stains and then overlaid the lot with three more coats of the yellow to blend the colours and tie them all together, this is in fact a technique I have often used in Watercolour painting with very thin washes of colour.
Once the colouring was complete and dry I coated the vase with three layer of finishing oil and left it overnight to dry, buffing it through the three wheel system to a soft gloss finish this morning, here then is the resulting Coloured Hollow Form Vase.
Thanks for the video Andy!
