One day I was working from my home office, which happened to have a great view of my “Chickadee” project, in the early blocking phase, when a Robin came along and struck the exact pose I was looking for! Of course, I took this as a sign if divine validation of my artistic abilities 🙂
I wanted to tell this story since the picture is too cool not to be shared, and also because the Chickadee project is “informing” my carving journey in so many ways.
Firstly, the Chickadee reminds me of my tendency to reach to high and too fast. My only carvings prior to this were two or three mediocre bears. Since then, I’ve heard a number of opinions on the topic of branching out, and the common theme is that experimenting is great and necessary, but you should work on nailing down a particular pattern first. Like, 30 bears, or 100 pine trees, until it becomes muscle-memory.
Next, I learned the value of having a 3D model to work from, and also the advantage of practicing on something cheap and easy, like a bar of Ivory Soap (see my video on this).
The soap model is pictured here along with the wood carving, and this is about as far as I could comfortably go with the chainsaw at that time. I put this aside for a couple of weeks, and after my confidence grew some more, I went back to do some trim and rounding work with the saw. Probably should have done more with the saw before moving on to the angle grinder, because the bird was still looking more like a fat Pidgeon than a sleek Chickadee. The lessons kept on coming!
Since the project was (and still is) dragging along, I got to see what the ravages of time will to an Ash log after it’s been trimmed down and stored in a dehumidified basement. I’ve learned a lot about wood drying and crack repairs since then (mostly from Kyle Hall’s videos) and I needed to do some rudimentary fixes just to make it carve-able once again (pictured).
So, this is where it stands at the time of writing. My wife Sylvie created the quilted chickadee, and it shows the attitude and energy that was on my mind when I started. I would like to stick with the original goal rather than pivoting to some other bird that it may resemble, and I’d like a nice smooth surface with good feathers so it can be painted realistically. Some compromises will be in order, such as carving and joining the beak separately, and I’ll also need to figure something out with respect to the feet and legs. It’s something I struggle with on many projects. That is, when to “give up” on something, when to double-down on the original vision, and when to allow it to become whatever it wants to?
