Tiny carvings on pencils! Part 1
We have featured artists who work in miniature previously on the blog. For example, David A Lindon in the UK, who makes tiny sculptures on needles or pin heads! (You can catch those posts via the links in footnote 1 below.)
Today we feature an artist who works in tiny detail in a different medium – carving sculptures in the graphite lead of a pencil! Can you believe it!
He is Russian man Salavat Fidai. Take a look at his intricate work in the following 3 minute video:
Courtesy of MyModernMet
Isn’t his work incredible! One tiny slip and it would be gone (and often is!) This is because the lead in a pencil is made primarily of graphite.
You may remember learning about chemical elements in school chemistry?! Did you know that, like a diamond, graphite is made of pure carbon. However, whilst the atoms in a diamond are arranged in a repeating three dimensional tetrahedron pattern, which make it extremely hard, the carbon atoms in graphite are arranged in horizontal hexagonal layers which slide off each other very easily. This what happens when you write with a pencil. Therefore, graphite is very soft, so you can imagine how difficult it is to carve with! Add to that the tiny surface area of the core of a pencil and I really don’t know how he does it!
Salavat Fidai was originally a lawyer and spent more than 25 years working in this profession. However, in 2013, during the economic crisis in Russia, he began working full-time as a digital photographer. His work focusing on still-life photographs of fruits and vegetables was exhibited in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 2014, he turned to painting and from there progressed to creating miniature paintings on matchboxes, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and even grains of rice!2 It was later in 2014 that he began sculpting miniature figures out of pencil graphite, and even coloured pencils (which have a different make up).
It usually takes between six and twelve hours to produce one tiny piece, while complicated models take between two and three days to create. At first, he used jumbo pencils with a graphite diameter of 5mm. He now primarily uses pencils between 0.5 and 2mm in diameter.2 Can you believe it!
His microsculptures have featured characters from movies and cartoons, animals, objects from popular culture, comic book characters, famous works of art, household items, and architectural icons. 2
Salavat Fidai's microsculptures have been exhibited in London, Singapore, Los Angeles, Sharjah, and Saint Petersburg. Visitors are often given a magnifying glass to view the tiny sculptures!
Here is some more of his intricate work, courtesy of Bored Panda contributor Hidreley:
Hidrėlėy
Once I started to research this a little more, I found that there are a number of these sorts of artists around the world! We will return another day to look at the work of some more of these artists – some who also include the wooden pencil casing in their sculptures as well.....
Footnotes