Carv­ing a 1930s Street Scene, A New Book by the Car­i­ca­ture Carvers of America

Bob Travis, Randy Lan­den, Sandy Smith and Jack A. & Car­ole Williams

Twenty-nine active and emer­i­tus mem­bers of the Car­i­ca­ture Carvers of Amer­ica are pleased to present a pho­to­graphic excur­sion down a typ­i­cal 1930s street, com­plete with car­i­ca­ture ren­di­tions of 11 period build­ings and over 100 car­i­ca­ture wood­carv­ings.  Street ven­dors, ladies, fire­men, cops, bank rob­bers, dogs, an old cow­boy from a bygone era, a hobo sleep­ing on a bench, and many other relics from the past are rep­re­sented in this scene.  From a garage at one end of the street, to a three-story build­ing under con­struc­tion at the other end, this scene rep­re­sents down­town Amer­ica dur­ing the Great Depres­sion. This book comes com­plete with  detailed instruc­tions for carv­ing a fire­man, plus paint­ing and fin­ish­ing tips and tech­niques offered by CCA mem­bers.  Help­ful tips on design­ing car­i­ca­ture carv­ings through sketch­ing, clay mod­els, man­nequins, and Inter­net searches are pro­vided, along with pat­terns for many of the carv­ings in the scene.

The idea for a 1930s street scene as the CCA’s next book project was dis­cussed as early as 2010.  In late 2011, at our annual meet­ing in Boise, ID, we decided to move for­ward with the ven­ture.  At an impromptu meet­ing and group dis­cus­sion on a street scene, it became appar­ent there was strong inter­est in the idea.  Within a few min­utes peo­ple were vol­un­teer­ing to cre­ate a vari­ety of spe­cific build­ings.  Our sec­re­tary began a list, and in a short time 11 build­ings were claimed by mem­bers.  Some build­ings were con­structed by one mem­ber, oth­ers by groups of two or more. Those not work­ing on build­ings carved fig­ures and ancil­lary pieces to fill out the spe­cific scenes.

We’re fre­quently asked, “How do you coor­di­nate a project of this mag­ni­tude?”  The sim­ple answer is, “We don’t.”  Most of us are sep­a­rated by great dis­tances and don’t have an oppor­tu­nity to work together dur­ing the year.  We agree on a theme, set the scale, return home and work indi­vid­u­ally on the project until the next annual meet­ing.  In this case, those not work­ing on spe­cific build­ings had the advan­tage of know­ing what struc­tures would be included in the project, and could carve fig­ures and acces­sories specif­i­cally designed for a given build­ing or scene.  Finally, we sched­uled a work day in con­junc­tion with our annual meet­ing to set up the project.  Mem­bers brought their con­tri­bu­tions and we spent the day final­iz­ing the place­ment of the fig­ures and build­ings.  After sev­eral hours of arrang­ing, rear­rang­ing, and then rear­rang­ing again, the project was fin­ished.  We took ref­er­ence pho­tos, made some notes, and called it a day.

For addi­tional infor­ma­tion, includ­ing how to order this book visit the CCA web­site at www.cca-carvers.org or click HERE