Ugly Boy Flutes

"By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea..."

Ah, my good ol' barbershop days...hearing in my head the Cincinatti Kids quartet singing the 'title' song on a CD of theirs...

Well, my mid-F# "Sea Flute" (made of spalted, quartersawn Sycamore) is finished. I blogged about it recently on how the key shift left me with a predicament, where I had to cut a perfectly good flute and make some critical adjustments for a customer. In that blog I had not talked about the block or shown it (because it wasn't completed!)...a neat creation on how it came about.

I'm glad I opted for the turquoise bird inlay at the flute 'foot'...from the older post you may remember the bottom was too thin for a band inlay all the way around due to oversanding of the tuning hole I had to remove. I'm pleased with it's look and balance.

For the block, a seagull of sorts was requested. At first I was thinking a simple shape that maybe was painted in the motif of a gull...and, typical of how I approach a lot of what I do with my art, I started going to town. I used a general but more 'involved' design I'd used on that stunning piece of Cocobolo with the head-down Eagle (prior post), and I figured I'd paint it like a gull.

The only problem was that as I went to research pictures of gulls, there are myriad pattern and coloration variations...so I picked one and began painting. I hated it. OK, hate is a little strong, but I knew that wasn't going to satisfy my 'vision', and so I took the wood burning pen and roughly put in feathers and such. I tried to realistically paint it again. Nope. Wasn't working either...in fact, the burning lines made painting much harder on that small surface...and then it hit me.

I'd done it before on other pieces of art and flutes...you paint something and then 'distress' it by taking fine sandpaper and lightly going over the piece, letting some bare wood show through and ending up with a piece that looks folk-artish and weathered...and what is more weathered than things exposed to the salty sea air? Once I did that, I really really liked the look of it. While the flute has a gloss finish, I opted for a satin finish for the gull, as it 'fit in' better. Too, where the lace is wrapped, I left the wood wavy to mimic beach sand (though little is visible with the lace in place)...

(click on pics to enlarge)

Now I wait to simply hear back, since any custom order client has the opportunity to say yay or nay. By the way, did you hear about the love affair at sea? A classic case of 'buoy' meeting 'gull'...