Thursday Salute to Originals: The Incredible Art of Eggshell Carving
Eggshell carving is an incredible craft technique that involves extreme attention to detail and patience. Eggshell carving artists usually devote hundreds of hours of practice and work into perfecting carving skills and creating intricate eggshell sculptures. Brian Baity is one of them and today, we are looking at some of his custom works.
Brian’s carved eggshell portfolio includes ostrich egg, rhea egg, emu egg, and goose egg. He knows the characteristics of each kind of eggshell very well and is able to bring out their beauty with his artistic vision; his “imagination provides unlimited opportunities to influence and transform an accidental broken egg into a graceful, exquisite finished art piece.”
By altering carving techniques, Brian creates different textures on eggshells. The polished and smooth surface of this calla lily set it apart from the rest of the porous eggshell.
Rhea eggs (rheas are flightless birds native to South America) are on average less than half the size of ostrich eggs. This particular work is inspired by pathways in Chinese and Japanese gardens. The voids resemble large rocks while small perforations are stone pathways. Through the marriage of the egg shape and the circular form for the path, Brian is expressing that “all things come back to their point of origin; sooner or later.”
Emu Eggs
Like we’ve all experienced, behind each successful piece of work is devotion and a process of trial and errors. No matter if it’s as small as an eggshell or big as a 15 foot long backlit table (watch our build process here), the creation process can be painstaking but the result will make all the hard work worth it.
Does this remind you of any challenging project you have successfully accomplished? Was the devil in the details? We’d like to hear about it!
Image Credits: Brian Baity