Bitcoin Forum

Material: AAAA Grade - Jatoba Heartwood (http://www.wood-database.com/lumber-identification/hardwoods/jatoba/)
Price: 5.7BTC
Commissioned By: IronMarvel (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=176914) / IronMarvel2 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=411686) (his account was hacked and theymos has not resolved it yet.
Coin: 6 of 10 to be made for the 2015 year

"Morning Calm" is an artistic representation of peace and harmony in bitcoin culture. When it started i was given a symbol, and asked to build a coin around it. Almost instantly i was taken back to my memories of The Garden of Morning Calm  (http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=264212). One of the most peaceful and tranquil places i have ever known on the planet. With patterned carvings of abstract Hibiscus and vine, "Morning Calm" instills a sense of harmony within a room. An overwhelming sense of calm can be felt when standing it its presence and looking deep into the detail of the garden carved into this coin.

Morning Calm is coin number 6 of 10 in the series.

It is so beautiful... What does the back side look like though? Just curious.

I leave it up to the owner of the coin to post pictures of the reverse if they wish as this one has their bitcoin address carved into it. He posted pictures of the back side of his other coin, so i am sure he will do so on this one too once it is in his hands. Its going half way around the world from where i live so it will be about a week and he might have pics of it up.

Man, can I be your apprentice or something-I'll work for free!

In my opinion, the nicest piece so far! Great work. It seems like it only keeps getting better :)

Amazing piece of work, simply beautiful!

Great job.

Damn mate , the workmanship is remarkable  :o

Very very stunning piece.

This is such a breathtaking piece!
It is for a very special and wonderful person in my life.
She is going to love it.
Thank you WoodCollector for another piece of true art!

I wont be taking on an apprentice for a while, but when i do it will have a $500,000 price tag. There are under 100 Master Artisan Wood Carvers in the world and it requires 20 years to become a Master Artisan as well as doing your journeyman study as an apprentice of a Master Artisan. The price may sound steep but a Master Artisan makes 20 times that a year. There are a lot of great wood carvers in the world, but a single piece from a Master Artisian fetches 5-10 times that of a hobbyist, and after completing a journeyman study a Junior Artisan can make that money back within a year just having studied under one of the masters.

wonderful art as usual  ;)

just curious, how many hours does it takes you to finish an art like this one?

This one was 120 hours carving, 2 hours toning with a torch, 9 hours of finish work.

Beautiful peice of art. Amazed with the detail. Where do I get one.

Reallly nice piece. Whats the size of that coin ?
And what wood is used ?

You cant anymore unless you have 500BTC to spend on coin #10 when i list it for sale. there are only 10 of the 2015 collection. I may decide to sell some of my personal 2014 collection at some point but for now i am rather attached to them.


THANKS !!!!

All the details are listed in the first post

AH got it. Almost missed the material type.
However still can't see the size mentioned.

11"

Sorry, it was in the title not the post, i'll get it fixed when i get back to the shop.

Without a doubt, one of my favourite pieces. Any plans to make a coin with a similar design on a smaller piece of wood?

How many years does the journeyman study as an apprentice of the Master Artisan?

Beautiful design, really nice detail.



At 5.7 BTC for 131 hours of work, aren't you making just under eleven bucks an hour?  ???

Nope, The 2015 Coins are done, #9 was just commissioned and a deposit paid, Once the balance is paid by Friday that will conclude the 10 coins for 2015. Coin # 10 will be listed for sale in the coming weeks and the secret of the 10 coins will be revealed. I will still make you a plaque if you want, no year listed but no more coins will be made until December of 2015 when i start the 2016 coins.


An Journeyman must study for 2 years minimum under the guidance of a Master Artisan to earn is Junior Artisan qualification Sometimes it takes 5 years, it all depends on how well you learn. As a Junior Artisan you can expect to earn $200k - $500k a year for your work. I must warn that 2 years studying under a master artisan is no picnic, it's not fun, and is enough to make a grown man cry. 2 Decades ago when i started my career, my liege (the master artisan whom i studied under) took a hatchet to a piece i had spent 6 months carving, told me it was absolute shit, and that i didnt deserve to lay my hands on such a beautiful piece of wood as i was incapable of letting it express its true beauty. I wanted to put the hatchet into his head ! But after i finished my Journeyman study and he approved my Opera d'arte (final work of art that you must complete to signal you are ready to move on) I realized that his harsh criticisms and ability to non-stop ride my ass pushed my levels of ability to that beyond what most ordinary men are able to do.

Once you complete your Journeyman study you must complete 5 years as a Junior Artisan, Sometimes this is done as an apprentice (instead of a student) to a master artisan, others as an independent study, this is where you learn to take the skills you picked up as a student and fine tune your craft, this is where your art defines itself in style and quality. I did my Junior study in Italy, France, and China, with frequent trips to other places to find my zone.  

Once you complete your time as a Junior Artisan a Master Artisan must review another Opera d'arte then you become an Artisan. Artisans on average can earn $1 million to $2 million a year for their works. After 10 years as an artisan you are able to request a Opera d'arte review from a Master Artisan. This piece must be of the highest quality, with the utmost precision, with flawless lines, perfect curves, immaculate detail, perfectly embodied within the grain of your subject wood. In short, so perfect that nobody could ever replicate its existance, something so astounding that the most state of the art machines could not manufacture something as precise. IF the Master Artisan feels that you have truly mastered your craft, that you have reached the highest level of craftsmanship that is possible, he may deem you a Master. Some Artisans spend their entire life trying to reach the Master level, very few ever do. Master Artisans are the top of the craft, earnings exceed $10 million a year on average, and a true Master Artisan piece of art can fetch upwards of $1 million USD by itself.

Artisan Wood Crafters are a society that have been around since the year of four emperors in 69 AD in Rome, Long before even the free masons and stone workers. Much lesser known as we are a quiet bunch, secrets are so secret that they are not even known as secrets. Meetings are never held but once every 50 years by the Masters. As a culture it started by the carving of the royal beds in 69 AD. Still today, Wherever the heads of royalty, or leaders of nations lay at night, you can pretty much guarantee it is in a bed created by a Master Artisan. A tradition over 2,000 years old

I have yet to lay out the "top of my skill" on a bitcoin piece that anyone has seen here on the forums, but when you see coin #10 you will understand why it holds a 500BTC price tag even beyond the surprise that it holds. Coin #10 is a true masterpiece and the top of the trade.

$500k to take on a Journeyman when i decide to do so will be a solid investment in someones future, but i will not take on just anyone when i decide to do so. In today's dollars, i paid the equivalent of $2 million dollars to study under my liege 2 decades ago. But i was able to study under one of the greatest on the planet at the time, 50 years as a Master Artisan when he took me in as his under-study.

WoodCollector, your life is pretty fucking interesting to read about. Maybe you should write a book about your journey, how you got into wood carving, why you decided to get into Bitcoins, etc. I would love to read it!

BTC was $400 when he paid. So more like $18.

Like i have said MANY times, i do not charge normal rates to the bitcoin community as i love bitcoin and i enjoy making bitcoin art, doing bitcoin pieces is not work for me, it is passion, and it is fun. My normal rate averages about $450 to $800 an hour depending on the difficulty of the wood i am working with.

Ask me to carve you a jewelry box for your wife to put her million dollar earrings and a necklace in with your family crest detailed on the lid, or a cigar box for your cubans and you are going to un-ass $30,000 and get about 10 - 20 hours worth of carving out of me, although the carving will be at the height of precision and the top of my craft.

What a bargain. I am still regretting that I did not commission on of these 9 coins  :'(

Like i said, we are a quiet people, there are no books about us, we worked very hard to stay out of the history books that your teachers use in school. My legacy will be carried on by my protege, If someday that person becomes a master himself, he will know the secrets i know, and pass on my knowledge and life story to his protege some day.

Why i got into bitcoins, thats an easy one. The dumbest thing a person with money can do is let it sit. A wise man uses his money to make more money. Until 2008 i kept all my money in investments like the stock market, security bonds, treasury bonds, and Diamonds. Then one day in 2008 i watched my portfolio drop 600 points overnight. For 6 years i literally buried my money under the shed, stacks of $100 bills, and thousands of Carats of diamonds.

This past October my brother gave me 10 Bitcoins as a gift, and told me to spend them. So what else do you do in my position but set out to buy some top quality wood. That led me here, and the rest is history waiting to be written.

Your still on my list if the balance due is not paid on #9 by Friday. If nothing else i may give you a sneak peak of my personal 2014 collection that i made for myself and let you purchase something out of there. Or i can make you a plaque or really anything else you want.

That sounds great :)

In any case you have already given me (and the community) a lot.
I enjoy studying each of the pieces and finding the small details and the thinking about the meaning of the theme.
Before November 2015 I had no idea about the existence of Artisan craftsmanship.

I may even work out a trade with you for a little development work, i am putting together a project soon for "POO Chain" (proof of ownership) based on bitcoin tech using a blockchain. basically a client that runs on a network that has public notes, allowing artists to assign ownership of a piece to someone and using a base 58 public key or address to sign the work, Thus, when the artist sends a small amount of whatever i call the unit of measurement from their registered artist address, to the address on record for the particular art piece. it shows that it was in fact made by the artist.

When helping a few clients from the forum get their art pieces insured, the insurance company LOVED that i used an encrypted private key / public key system on the CoA as it makes it literally impossible to forge with todays computing technology. They even gave my clients a discount on the insurance as the liability on the forgery coverage went down to 0.001% risk assessment.

I would buy said book, put it on my desk...

That is a great idea. It also emphasize that "the blockchain" is properly one of the most important inversion of this century. People tends to focus on the dollar exhange price of bitcoin, but forget about the importance of the technology behind.

I would love to work with you, just send me a PM when you want to get started, then will I share my ideas on the topic, we might need to assemble a team to this type of development, but that should not be hard to find the right people in this community, with all the altcoins around there must be programmers which can implement "our specification" with their eyes closed.

I am probably going to get the outline and overview of the project done next week, some sort of a document that details what the software technology needs to do and how it will operate. I know NOTHING about software development so i have to wait to talk with my brother who is the encryption guy and software guy to figure out whats possible, although you probably know just as much about the subject. Not sure if you use skype at all but i am on there a few times a day at least if you want to add me to your contacts.

Really nice and interesting work, and a nice read on your story :)

Everything you make is seriously amazing

I would like to be put on your list for one of next years pieces :D

These are beautiful! Thank you for sharing with us.

You have been added.

Gorgeous wood carving. Very interesting story about your career.

Question though, if you're making $x million per year, why did you need a 2 BTC loan to buy a wood lathe?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=871938.msg10191336#msg10191336

My father has been into carving for a few years now and I showed him some of your work. He said he's very interested to see how you can get such fine details by hand, and has requested to see some shots of your carving tools in action!

He said his attachment to Bitcoin causes him to give us a large discount, maybe we are hindering his ability to make big bucks unless we start paying him $xxx,xxx for each piece of art.

Maybe!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=930649.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=930649.0)

Another exquisite piece by the talented Woodcollector and what an interesting story about your life, I look forward to leaning more about you and your skill in the future.

i have placed a second order and paid in full beforehand with woodcollector couple days ago.

This me reposting from the scam accusation thread so you can address this issue:


That last part gave me a chuckle.

I asked these similar questions a few months back when he first started posting.

When I got to the point that his work looked very similar to laser engraving the discussion quickly got pushed off to Skype or email which I never got around to.

@wood collector, take a camera and video tape an entire piece you have done at the same caliber of your previous pieces. Then fast forward it in a time lapse to show you actually did it with your hands.

To me your work does look laser engraved and not hand carved. Honest opinion.
I will publicly apologize should my opinion turn out to be wrong.