How to carve fieldstone pieces

If you're like me you wish for more pieces in the Hirst Arts Fieldstone line. Until our wish comes true we'll have to make do on our own.
Fortunately it's pretty easy to carve fieldstone pieces. I used my custom T fieldstone piece as the model for this guide but you can use this technique on any fieldstone piece.

The first step is to get your blank master, I'm using Hydrostone for my plaster as it's hard enough to not rub off details but soft enough to carve easily. I used the 1" X 1" X 1/2" piece from the Station Builder mold and cut it down to the right size. The pieces from this mold are extremely handy for using as blank masters as they're the standard size and have no texture. I've used them to carve crates, barrels, and a ton of other stuff. Now, I just need to actually build something with the mold...

The next step is to figure out where to carve the stones into the master. I'm going to draw the stones on the master with a pen. This is to see how the pattern looks before I remove any material from the master. I like to compare the pattern I've drawn to an existing bock to make sure it'll match up well and I haven't made the stones too big or too small. Here's a time when planning ahead is a good idea. I first drew and carved the piece I realized that it needed to sit on the top of the T when I made a mold of it to be usable but I had carved it to let it sit as you see it in the pics so I had to carve the bottom as well. Oh, well. Live and learn

To draw the pattern I used a generic pen I got at Wal-Mart. You'll need to get one of the pens that have the really dark gel ink or a felt tip marker. A regular ball point pen isn't going to provide enough ink to be visible.

The block looks like some sort of leopard print but all we have to do from here is carve the channels between the stones we drew. To carve the block I used an old hobby knife that I've had around for years. The blade is worn down and the tip broke off long ago. You could also use dental tools or some sort of sharp instrument (I've got several probes in my toolbox I use on cars that work fine too). You should also be extremely careful when carving on your block. Make sure you don't carve towards your hand and there's no way you can get hurt if the blade slips.

To start with you just need to cut channels between the stones you drew on the block. Don't worry about carving the stones themselves yet. You just want to get the basic shapes of the stones. Cut the channels as deep as you want them to be on the final piece. Again, be very careful not to cut yourself doing this. You don't have to apply much pressure to carve plaster, even Excalibur or Merlin's Magic although you'll have to go over each channel more times than the weaker Hydrostone I'm using. Applying too much pressure on each pass you can slip and damage your pattern or hurt yourself. You'll have to go over each channel repeatedly with the knife to carve the channel to the depth you want. You don't have to carve every block exactly as you drew it. If you see a way to make the block better that's against your pattern go ahead and change it. You're not stuck with a pattern until you actually carve the channel.

The channels are now pretty straight and the depth I want, but there isn't any pattern and the edges of the stones are sharp and don't look natural. The next step is to round off all the edges of each stone and make them look more like stones and less like they were carved from a solid block. This is pretty easy to do. Just take the blade and gently drag it across the edge at different angles until the edge is smooth and there are no straight lines or edges until the stone gets to the mortar that's supposed to be holding the stone in place. You'll also have to round off the corners and the edges of the block or it just won't look right. Fieldstone is supposed to be unworked stones and not the carved blocks used by Gothic or Egyptian builders. It shouldn't have many sharp edges, if any at all.

After the stones are rounded off it starts to look much better. At this point the majority of the carving is finished and the piece is starting to look like a fieldstones piece. The only thing missing is the texture on the stones. In the picture you can see that I started a pattern on the bottom of the T so you can see the difference between the stones with textures and without. Making a texture is pretty easy. Take the tip of your knife and rough up the surface of the stone adding chips and gouges and a general rough surface. Keep in mind that we're going to be dry brushing the final block so we can't just gently scrape the surface of the block. You need some slightly different depths for the dry brushing to come out in the end so keep that in mind. Once the surface texture is done then all that's left is making a mold of the piece and casting it. You can also use some Gothic blocks as the base if they're the right size. I've used the long sloping fieldstone blocks as the basis for custom fieldstone sloping pieces and basically left the gothic texture mostly intact on the surface of the stones and it worked out well.

Here are some pictures of the final piece. As you can see it works quite well with the standard fieldstone blocks. Hopefully this will help break up the horizontal lines in my buildings. There's also some sloped fieldstone pieces I did using the same technique.