A couple of weeks ago, Rod shared a new project with us. Let's catch up on his progress.

Having come to the conclusion in Part 3, that being just too careful wasn't going to get much done and would introduce an element of boredom fairly soon, I set about it, with a will - but not with abandon.

The top lip (His, that is), under the nose (the filtrum?) and the bit of the nose joining the brow are a couple of millimetres shallow, to allow for trimming, as is the rest around the nose - the remainder is rather shallower than that few mm.

I've marked the eye positions – they're where the vertical and horizontal lines would meet. They are going to be a problem as I can't see me being able to carve any convex shape at that depth – maybe the pupils will have to be drilled holes, 5 – 10 mm deeper than the eyeballs - if balls they turn out to be. Anyway, they're still 7 or 8 mm shallow … good grief there's a lot of wood to be cut away!

Also shown are

the tools I accumulated in earlier years.


The collection lacks some larger tools for things of this size but the budget won't allow for that just yet – or, indeed, for the foreseeable future.

These vary in width from about 16mm (on the left) to about 3mm with various profiles (as marked in the left-hand block, if they show well enough on the photo, while the right-hand one is a V-tool.

Being near kin to the conventional woodworking tools, they are called Chisels but carving chisels have some curvature across the blade, to allow shaping curved surfaces by means of grooves.

Articles by Rod

21.10.13 Front Page

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