Central Carving Painting Options

Most of our barrel head carvings and clocks have a large central carving as the centerpiece.  This page describes the options for hand painting this carving.  The options and costs depend on whether your carving is “2D” or “3D”.   A complete description of this distinction can be found in our article Decorative Wood Carvings – 2D vs 3D, but simple explanations can be found below.

3D Carvings and Painting Options

“3D carvings” are carvings of rich 3d artwork (relief models) and consist of carved curved surfaces in 3d space.  These may or may not be hand painted depending on your taste and budget.  The rich quarter-sawn oak of the barrel heads makes an unpainted (stained only) carving look stunning without any additional embellishment.   Painting a 3D carving (or a 2D carving) with subtle gradients, tonal blending and shading requires a highly talented artist, whose canvas is the wood.  We work with excellent local artists to produce these paintings which are true works of art in themselves, as seen in the close-ups below.

The above set of 4 close-ups of our very popular 3D grape cluster carving show the carving unpainted and painted in purple, burgandy and blue tones.

2D Carvings and Painting Options

“2D carvings” are carvings of 2d artwork (like logos and other graphic art), and consist of V-carved lines and flat planes.  They are faster and easier to carve and finish, and therefore less expensive than 3D carvings.

2D carvings are generally painted in solid gradient-free colors to look like the original 2d graphic artwork or logo (though sometimes they are also painted in gradient rich color like the 3D carvings).  Gradient-free painting of a 2D carving requires a steady hand and a lot of patience, but not a lot of artistic ability as its basically “paint by numbers”.  This makes them less expensive to paint.   We generally don’t recommend unpainted 2d carvings because they aren’t as interesting.

The above close-ups of 2d paintings show 3 gradient-free examples, plus one gradient rich example.

You can see many more examples of both 3D and 2D carvings and paintings in our extensive galleries.  If you do select a hand painting option you can provide guidance on the colors and tones you want us to use via the “special instructions” text field (e.g. by referring to a photo in our galleries).