Ugly stumps carved into beautiful Bonsai

Design
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I miss his videos too, he has some great trees. I wonder if he has been a Mirai member at some point due to some of the phrases he has used in some of his videos.

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42

@Ralph thanks for the info. I hope someone here knows Russ and reaches out to him to tell him people miss his videos. The Robert Steven tree is fantastic, and I loved the reveal he did after showing the drawing in the book. Itā€™s perfect. Anyone who knows Russ, ask him to reappearā€¦

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43

Wow! You must have been amazed at the result?

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update on ted

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Sorry late to reply, but a lot of his trees were sold on eBay around the same time he took his channel down. I donā€™t know him, but I assumed he is no longer practising bonsai

46

@darren Iā€™m not sure how I missed your reply to this until now. Wow. His trees were sold on eBay? That tells me something must have happened to him. Thatā€™s terrible. He clearly loved working on his trees. I wonder if anyone here in the Mirai community was able to obtain any of his trees from these eBay auctions? How did you find out they were being sold on eBay? I couldnā€™t have bought any if I wanted to, since Iā€™m in the USA. But damn. I really liked him and his trees. Sad.

1 Like
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There was a lot of speculation on British Facebook groups when his YouTube channel shutdown, didnā€™t take long for the eBay ads to surface, the trees being quite distinctive

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@darren I wonder if anyone here in the Mirai community purchased any of his trees. If so, lucky score. I loved his trees. They were on track to be spectacular, no doubt. If you or anyone is interested, I managed to download all of his videos from YouTube a day before his channel went dead.

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49

Here is a Wild Olive Stump I collected a few years ago. It was my first carving serious carving project, so I would likely approach it differently if i started from scratch today.

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@DaveSydney, that is awesome. I love it. Quite a change from the stump in its original state. For a first time serious carving Iā€™d say itā€™s a total win. Love it.

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51

While it might look good to some will it not rot away much quicker than as a solid wooden bole? Maybe be interesting for a few years but as rot proceeds to root stock I would expect the tree to progressively die off.