 My name is Luke Parnell. I'm a carver and I've been carving for around 14 years. I learned to carve niche costale but sometimes the stories I tell are the highest stories. Measurements from the sketch. I drew one side on and I traced it and flipped it over and drew the other side on and all while I'm doing that I'm sort of imagining where I need to make start making my cuts like where I need to start making my chainsaw cuts and even though I'm drawing I'm always thinking about how the sculpture is going to look inside the hole so like a lot of these details are going to be cutting right off when I start roughing out but I need to draw it just so I can sort of imagine it in the wood. Piece that I worked on for this video is called Storytellers Have Big Mouths. The reason I chose to style it the way I did was because I had never done a sculpture where the figure sort of popped off the wood and I'd never done a raven like a full like flying raven on a total before either so it was a couple elements that I'd never done before and so the reason for the title is just I just wanted to show the figure telling a story it's a raven sort of a raven story I don't really haven't really decided which story yet but that's not really important the idea isn't so much important what story he's telling it so what a fact that he keeps telling these stories and it sort of comes from a something an elder told me once where he said that the reason they tell the same story is over and over again is so that we remember and so that's sort of the idea behind it carving stages are basically coming up with an idea you can come from anywhere whether it's telling a traditional story or maybe you're just doing a four crest pole once you do that you sort of figure out what kind of a sort of crest you want to use whether it's going to be all human beings or animals and then you start planning once you figure out what you're going to do and you have like a scale drawing or a scaled mechette then you start putting the design onto the totem pole and you do that by measuring things on the pole measuring points and then once you draw it on basically you just start roughing with the chainsaw and cutting bits away until it gets to a certain point and then next you continue roughing with the hand tools and then you continue roughing until you start using sort of smaller hand tools and then apply paint and then apply finish it's pretty straightforward it just takes a lot of work you hollow at the back of a totem pole because it helps it dry or see them a little more evenly the thicker parts will dry slower than the thin parts and at least cracking and it's a big piece of wood so it'll always crack but it just helps it crack less and wait obviously it weighs less my work is carved a little deeper than traditional heita but a lot of the heita carvers nowadays carve pretty deep if you looked at an old heita totem pole a lot of times the figures will only be about two or three inches deep so the carver won't carve any deeper than that so it's a little bit more round than like say like shimshan or nishka carving where the old totem poles are more humanistic and so they carved a lot deeper so that the figures look a bit more human like the arms and the legs you know have fingers and they're sort of shaped like a human figure whereas with the old heita poles it's much more design oriented so you know an arm will look like a a split u form and the legs will be sort of similar and the hands will be sort of very stylized sort of blocky rather than sort of human looking like human hands and you know and also the eyes the eyes are more they're more like panels panels sort of stretched around a pole whereas nowadays if you look at a lot of heita work it's it's same but it's evolved quite a bit since the old days once i'm finished carving the totem pole i am going to be working on a few smaller projects i'll be working on a mask um and also a installation with 10 really small mass mackettes yeah and i'll be doing some drawing and some writing so just a bunch of small stuff and i'm also working on like an eight panel sequential narrative which isn't such a small project but i'm not sure if i'll get to that right away um well if something was starting off carving and i think i think you basically just need to start anywhere like if you're working if you're working on your own then i would recommend you start with a mask and just dive right in but if you're apprenticing and you're apprenticing with this working on a totem pole then just do whatever you're told dive in and just try not to cut yourself