Creating old grain on very young unbalanced deadwood

Since it’s been 2 years since my last post, I figured it’s about time to get back into the act of sharing the work I’ve been doing with you guys via the blog.  No, I am not dead.  So I will go into 2016 with a head start by writing about some fun and challenging carving I recently did on a very raw Rocky Mountain Juniper.  Although I didn’t do a very good job documenting the process with photos, I hope you will get an idea of how and why the work I did was carried out.  A combination of heavy duty Dremel bits and various hand carving tools were utilized, I will do my best to explain with the series of before and after photos to follow-

There were many long straight branches that were either eliminated in the past by someone or something… It is possible that borers had their way, I found signs of them when I stripped the old bark.

Here is the opposite side, at this point the front of the tree will remain undecided until the deadwood is finished and we are ready to style.

A closeup to show some detail.

A dilution of lime sulfur and water was applied to bleach the newly carved wood.

View from above.