What are the most important considerations when sculpting a large piece of wood?

Question

I'd like to try sculpting a higback lounge chair with arm supports from a single piece of wood, but I have zero experience with this. Any tips, suggestions, useful links?

I would like to use maple, but not sure if it has the right characteristics. Want to avoid cracking, and any other ill effects over time.

Answer 1

This will be very difficult, since the entire chunk of wood you begin with needs to be cured - dried out slowly and in a controlled way so that there are not too many cracks.

As a marginally educated guess, I would expect that you would need 10 years to properly cure such a mass of wood. This process of aging wood is an art in itself, and from what one sees in commercially available wood,  it is ceertainly not commonly practiced.

But even if you did manage to do this well, the nature of wood is that a piece carved from a large block would tend to warp in one direction or another. Here again, there is a skill in putting wood together in such a way that one piece keeps the next from warping.