Laurent Niclot

January 21, 2024

Originally from Southern France, now living in Colorado, Laurent has always loved wood. While working on a degree in woodworking and furniture design, he discovered woodturning and knew it was his passion. At age 20, he participated in the six-month long woodturning class at the Escoulen School in Aiguines, France with Jean-François Escoulen and Yann Marot. After the class, Laurent was hired and worked as the studio coordinator for 3 years. Today, he continues to make work and teach woodturning. His interests include traditional woodturning, texturing, coloring, multi-axis turning, carving and hollowing. He has taught his techniques around the world, including Belgium, France, Canada, and the US. Laurent considers his work experimental, and his aim is to make pieces that are sculptural, decorative, and designed with a strong message or a story to tell.

His demo will cover three topics, which all lead up to creating one of Laurent's signature pieces. Each of these topics will be covered in the Sunday, Monday & Tuesday Hands-On classes. The Hands-On classes are formatted in a way that a different topic is covered each day, but if participants would like to attend all three days they will end up with the ability to create a piece similar to his signature piece and there will not be too much overlap. But if you only want to attend 1 day for a particular topic, that will work great too.

Check out the photos below to see the beautiful pieces you can be inspired to make.

Saturday All-Day Demo

During the all-day demo on Saturday, he will cover the following three topics. The combination of these three demos will complete his signature piece.

Miniature Teapot: Turning of a miniature teapot (approximately an inch) using the bedan and demonstration on how to use it with the bevel up for spindle turning, hollowing of the teapot with miniature hollowing tools. Then turning of the lid and the spout (magnifiers not included) and coloring using India ink and gilding wax to create the Damascus steel effect. Finally, demonstration on how to make the handle using a wire and a cotton string on the lathe.

Multi-Axis Drop: Turning and turning off-center of a drop using a spindle gouge and a skew. Then carving of the top of the drop using gouges and rasps to make it thinner and have two different curves on the back and the front giving it an illusion of movement.

Texturing with a Woodburner: In this demonstration he will texture a piece of wood using the woodburner to carve and create an illusion of a different material. He will show you how to create a steampunk design (metal plates, gears, screws…) but also show how to make the wood look like stone, eggshell, leather… This demonstration is about showing the possibility of the woodburner used to carve and not just draw on the wood. If time allows he will show how to use acrylic paints and dry brushing to color the pattern created to make the illusion as close to reality as it can get. 

Resources:
 
     Website:  http://laurent-niclot.com/

Classes:

Miniature Hollow Form (+teapot) - Laurent Niclot - 1/21/2024

Multi-Axis Drop / Carving & Texturing - Laurent Niclot - 1/22/2024

Surface Treatment / Carving, Texturing & Coloring - Laurent Niclot - 1/23/2024