Today I'm gonna do the hands and guitar. As with any wood carving work, I try my best to remove as much wood as possible with power tools before actual carving. Here is the neck-cradling hand roughed out on the band saw. If you look closely you can see some penciled in fingers. The nubbin on the bottom will be his thumb.
This photo is a little blurry but this is what the hand looks like after I carved it.
This is the inner face of the strumming hand.
...And the outer face of the strumming hand.
Here is a bandsawed guitar shape. Also I started putting some vein lines in it. I tried to stay reasonably close to the drawn version. I made this guitar out of walnut because it's strong and I don't want the skinny neck to break. The rest of this guy is made of mahogany, which is very good for carving.
I used sections of toothpicks to simulate tuning keys. The tone and volume knobs are made from 3/16" dia dowels. What is not shown in this photo is the bridge. In this picture you can see I outlined a bridge behind the pickup, but I felt it needed to be raised. After this photo was taken I cut a piece of dowel the same length as the outline, and sanded one side so it was half-round, and glued that into the bridge location.
Here's a crudely cobbled together version of what the pieces will look like when they are resting on the eggroll's belly. (That's another one of those sentences I suspect has never been spoken in the history of the English language.)
Tune in tomorrow and watch this monstrosity continue.
Great 'How To' series KW~! Who knew watching an Egg-Roll for a week could be so suspenseful ~!
ReplyDeleteI am a LAZY artist at times. I understand the pleasure of woodworking, but lack the patience. If the task were mine, I would have Wok'N'Roll fashion me a giant egg-roll. I would add eyes, mouth etc. with air-drying clay, then dunk the sucker in a polyurethene bath over and over until a hard candy shell formed over the whole thing, then i'd paint it and spray it with clear-fixative~!
But your little wood buddy is old-school cool; it has HONOR & DIGNITY~! The more time, energy & thought put into a project, the more life it breathes~!
Wow!
ReplyDeleteYou make it sound like nothing, but I think from picture one to picture two, a lot of awesome work took place! Exactly how did you carve those tiny hands? With an exacto knife? I imagine that whatever tools you used, such a small piece would be dangerous to carve, especially if hand-held...Do you hold it in your hands to carve it, or hold it in a clamp device of some sort?
Being fairly wood-carving ignorant, I am curious.
Absolutely byoo-tee-fo!
Lysdexicuss, Thanks for the visit and the laughs! Even though you are joking, I wonder if this idea of yours might actually work. It seems suspiciously plausible. One could also use this method to create Terd-Birds. Or Turd-Birds, however you spell it.
ReplyDeleteMichael, Ha ha! I guess it did take a while between those pictures. I didn't notice because I was watching a movie while I worked. At some point I looked down and said, Hey, that looks done!
I should be using a vice, but I did just hold that in my hands when I carved it. What makes it even worse is for most of the work I used a large flesh-fileting 3" wide chisel. That's my favorite chisel because it's slanted like Gumby's head rather than straight across like Frankenstein's. It penetrates gradually rather than all at once, which is much easier.