Decorating Gourds

 Gourd transformation

Now that you have several raw gourds, what are you going to do with them? That's the problem I faced when I harvested and dried my first crop and found myself with about 200 bottle gourds and no clear idea of what I was going to do with them. I had never seen a decorated gourd other than maybe a painted birdhouse and had no idea that there are hundreds of talented people making works of art from gourds.

I decided to try my hand at woodburning some designs on gourds and I must confess that, at that time, I thought I was the first person to try that.Talk about naive.

 To paint or not to paint

All of the art work I do is done with a woodburner. I enhance the designs with various shades of leather dye and occasionally add some pine needles to the rim of a pot or bowl. I finish off the exterior with paste finishing wax.

This particular bowl design is a stylized depiction of our very old friend Kokopelli. This bowl blew off of a table at an outdoor gourd show a couple of years ago and broke into a dozen pieces. I glued it back together and refinished it, but, I guess, it'll be mine forever.

  Experimentation

Quite a few of my early gourd projects were Mbiri, or Thumb Pianos. The one to the right is from a bottle gourd. The top is 1/8 inch plywood and the "keys" are from the tines of a leaf rake. It works fine, but I have no idea what scale they are tuned to by the African natives.

A large portion of the art work I do is the depiction of scenes and characters from the numerous panels of rock art left in this area by the ancient Anasazi people. I often photograrh these petroglyphs and pictographs so I can draw them on a gourd as accurately as possible.

The figure on the pot shown is called, "Moab Man". It is on a rock art panel just a sliced tee shot away from the Moab Golf Course.

In the beginning, I created many musical instruments, including drums, rattles, and thumb pianos. I even made a ukulele. It looks great, but needs some more work in the tone area. Though I took great delight in turning these gourds into musical instruments, I haven't sold many of these items. The drums have a goatskin head.

Some of my favorite creations are various sizes of ornate dippers and ladles from dipper gourds.

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