I love it, but would not the aged bark not help with the finished look?
Although I have seen your work with the lime sulfur up close and can attest that you blend them beautifully, I feel that you might be selling this old surviver short by making the bark look younger but that is just my opinion and up front in person may be what I need to see what you see (You can ship it to me
).
What tools did you use for the carving?
Possibly you misunderstood the camp part. I did not paint any bark on the tree, ONLY the carved areas. If you look again at the pics you'll see how noticeable the carved/smoothed areas are. I use the paints to BLEND that color into the bark colors as closely as I can. Once the tree 'dirties-up' a bit they really blend in. The alternatives are to just let the large carved areas alone to rot ( and always show up like had been doing for years now) or lime sulfur which really makes them stand out which I don't want. If BT ever comes back up look up my old thread about serious carving on a huge bougie and notice how the carved areas just disappear. BTW, I had never seen anyone do this technique before I started using it.
For carving I used a Makita die grinder, my Samurai and Ninja Master, two sizes of core box router bits, and about 6 different shapes of burrs. Then I used some sanding flap wheels to smooth it a bit. I usually don't use them because the burrs leave a pretty nice finish. I wanted to smooth out this large piece bettr though and shape it better.
BTW, I mentioned I used a tad of lime sulfur in my acrylic paint mix. I do this not for any protection effect but I found it knocks off any possible sheen off the paint finish and also gives it a 'smokey' finish.
Maybe to help illustrate the paint camo blending better I'm enclosing two pics of my BIG bougie in which I did this after major carving and restyle. The carved areas are hardly noticeable and not much time has gone by since they were done.
Dale