[Skill] Carving

[Aneira Haimati]

Placeholder for the Carving skill, which I will write before the Maskmaking skill because it's required for Maskmaking. Anyone with actual knowledge about carving is welcome to help. I'd also appreciate advice on whether I should include all subsets of carving (wood, stone, ice, bone...) or just do basic Woodcarving and leave the others as sorts of specialties or their own separate skills.

[Torc Ironwood]

Hello Aneira,

Thought I would reply to this thread since I haven't seen anyone else yet do so, I have some wood carving experience and have kind of included it in a thread that I am making.

http://www.mizahar.com/forums/topic1936.html

If you would like more details I could help you out some.

[Reihn]

Random suggestion: Skill - Carving (includes all types: wood, stone, bone, etc.)

You probably already had that in mind though.

[Torc Ironwood]

Hmmmmmmmm.....

Personally I have always carved wood and stone. There are definitely differently techniques used in both. However, I would hate to make the skill so very specific to subsets, how about at high levels you can have different mediums that you carve?

[Aneira Haimati]

I would absolutely love help! If you wanted to pursue writing the skill yourself, I am definitely not opposed to that. Carving has taken a second seat to Maskmaking, which I am currently researching. I definitely intended to include various mediums, growing more difficult with each level, but as you can imagine, it's a daunting task for someone who has zero experience with the skill.

So, if you would like to work on Carving - great! If not, that's fine too, and I would LOVE your help.

[Torc Ironwood]

I guess I can write the carving skill. However, I just want to make sure its ok’d from the Storytellers before I do so. So I the next couple of points are just to make sure the skill is needed and everything.

1) Is Carving needed?

a. I can understand carving as a skill if an artist decides that he wants to make sculptures. However, In old times carpenters would create carvings for their high priced pieces. Examples: include chairs with leaves and animals in the backing, tables with artfully done legs, doors with relief scenes cut into them. Now the set of tools needed for nice detail work is expensive, but then again there wasn’t much call for high end work on doors, chairs, and tables. Stonemasons worked the same way, an artist would employ masons to cut out statues from stone and reliefs based on clay models that they did. It wasn’t till Di Vinci that artists as sculptors were really connected. As far as game mechanics, I just don’t want to have thousands of specific skills when perhaps we could have something like Carpentry (Mask making) or Carpentry(Carvings) where the skill is very specific.

2) If the answer to one is yes, then do we want subsets?

a. Personally I disagree with this, initially the person learning the skill could choose a medium and stick with it till expert level. Mainly this is because the two mediums (stone and wood) use different tools and act differently under the chisel. However the techniques are the same, and though someone who learned how to carve wood would need to practice a lot on stone before starting on it, they could still make a decent statue.

b. On the other side of this argument is Bone. Depending on what animal it came from different tools are needed. Whale bone has the toughness and density for a “chisel” like instrument, but most carving was done with files and sanding. Even drilling was done with a wood sick and grains of an abrasive material. Now I mention this because of Malediction.

3) I assume that if I write the skill an example of the carving process would be helpful?

4) As far as tools and prices, overall who will be adding them to the list?

Please everyone respond to the above post, I think the mods would like as much feedback as possible.

[Eanos]

From reading the skills overlap thread I suspect that it will be necessary to have a separate skill writeup for each medium of carving so that each writeup focuses on the unique parts of that skill. I'd say that detailing the carving process would be essential, not just as an example but as a core part of the writeup. After all many if not most of the peope who will come to use the skill on this site will have no practical experience with the craft.

[Torc Ironwood]

Doh! Ummmmm another question popped into my head, what about staining/lacquering, gold leafing, jewel/metal setting, and so on. Should I include this a part of the master level of the skill or do we need something else?

[Gossamer]

Okay guys... let me try and clear up a few things.

When we write skill writeups here, we don't want ten different skill requirements just to work with ten different materials. In general, skill writeups should include all forms of work you can do with the skill incorporated into the writeup. One example that stands out was that a player wanted to create a writeup (and did so) on Reed Weaving. Subsequent storytellers added tons of examples as to why the Weaving writeup should include reed weaving (and all other forms of weaving) but not be limited to Reeds. The player disagreed and the writeup was abandoned. That's a sad situation, but the truth is... weaving reeds takes the same sort of skill as weaving almost anything else - I know this since I've done a lot of weaving. Now, back to carving...

Basically the definition of carving is simply "The removing of material (as wood or ivory or stone) from a solid piece in order to create a desired shape." In this light, it doesn't matter if its bone, clay, stone, etc. We're basically talking sculpture. When you take sculpture classes in college, they start you out on soapstone (or even wax) to teach you the basic principles of 'removing all the parts that don't look like an elephant to carve an elephant'... same thing applies here. I knew almost nothing about carving until I was in college and we started a project called "A Carousal for Missoula' where we learned from the ground up how to carve carousal horses by working on the roses, flowers, gargoyles, etc on the main carousal itself. The man who taught us volunteers to carve started us out on balsawood since thats what most horses are made of.

So, materials are irrelevant. The skill can have you carving butter, fruits and vegetables, stone, bone, wood, and almost everything in between. The important part is that you include ALL these in the writeup. Don't get hung up on the material your carving, focus on the technique.

So... to answer your questions Zach..

1. Yes its needed.
2. No, please no subsets. We hate these in writeups.
3. Examples are always good.
4. Gillar can add them to the price list. There's already some of them there.
5. Painting is its own skill. To Stain/Lacquer you need a Painting skill. To set gems and metalwork on an art piece you need either Metalsmithing or Jewelcrafting (or both) as well. Carving is just carving! Finishing in the way we think of thing needing finished is a wholly different critter.

Hope that helps.