Naked Bowls

I guess it goes without saying that I love wood. I've always preferred it in it's natural state. When we started doing up our first house I couldn't bring myself to paint any of the wood work. My father in law (who did all of the building work) kept complaining that it looked half finished, but I just loved the look of the wood au natural. The idea of painting a wooden bowl would have made me spit. That was until I saw the bowls made by Jarrod Stonedahl and realised that painted bowls can look cool. Check out his latest bowls here. The problem is that I then got hooked on painting my bowls. I've had varying amounts of success with this. Some of them looked like they'd been hastily coloured in with a felt tip pen (Richard's words), but after a fair bit of experimentation, I feel pretty confident with my most recent ones.

I particularly like the way that painted bowls, once worn a bit, show up the tool marks in the wood. This is also really nice with carved bowls.

My latest bowls presented me with a bit of a dilemma. They're turned from Sycamore that was very green and the wood is pretty bland, so I was very tempted to paint them, but my wife has been telling me to leave some natural for a while now. Naturally my beloved (I have to call her that or she hits me) won the argument and so here they are in their birthday suits.