What a fun but tedious carving this has been. Problems galore but very interesting and lots of learning along the way. Yesterday finally decided enough is enough...when do you really know when it is "done". When you start looking at other wood and wondering what else you could be doing instead of picking away and second guessing yourself on this carving. So got out the paints and went at it. Spent most of the day on it, on and off, waiting for light coats to dry and painting between gardening. Tried a different technique on the beard and fur and mine sure does not look like the article I was going from. Oh well, anyway, got most of the major work done and today did some smaller areas and some detailing. Now I will look at it for another day finding small things that are annoying me and then touch up and final spray down.
I know I wish I had done the deer some other way as he just looks blah. The antlers are just plain ugly. And not at all sure about a fix I made early on. When carving the deer, the legs just seemed too long so went around the bottom of the whole carving about 1/2" and shortened up the Santa and the deer so now I have a base on which both stand upon so that made the deer much better and also provided a small base. Well today I decided to make the base into flag stones or field stones or ???? so detailed the 1/2" area into various stone sizes and shapes and then painted in shades of grey, black, brown, granite, etc. So at first I thought it pretty cool, and it is kind of....but at the same time, when looking at it just from the front, it looks like it could perhaps be strange (very) fur on the bottom of his robe. Yikes!!! So tomorrow may turn that 1/2" into snow...ha ha ha! Will try to put some new pics up on my web album, or my picture trail or here. I put him on Utube going around on a turntable but that is a bunch of work for this small question. So tomorrow will decide if he is salvageable.
Patti
Tags: Santa With Deer
