Post #519626 by seagoat on Wed, Mar 24, 2010 1:26 PM

Hey everyone, finally finished another piece. Well, almost finished. Figured I'd post some photos and do a bit of a write up again. This is a Tangaroa done out of another one of those eucalyptus branches. I tried looking at a bunch of different pictures of these and figure out what to do so hopefully I didn't step on any toes for style or anything, just trying to figure out how to do this.

So this is the first one I started with chisels. This piece was a little to big to only use the dremel with, so I thought I'd try chisels. It wasn't easy, somewhat due to my lack of equipment and workspace, but it was fun to work on and figure out. At a certain point I felt if I went any further with chisels I would mess something up and switched back to the dremel for starting to work on the detail. I used different burrs and cutters for the shaping and cutting and some diamond tip to start sanding/smoothing out.

Here are some small photos of the process and a few larger ones of the more finished piece. After all of the sanding, I did one coat of stain on it. You might be able to see a small sun/star 'tattoo' around the navel, and some zig-zag 'tattoo' around the eyes. They are not very deep so the stain didn't darken it as much as I wanted. Now I'm trying to decide if I should re-carve those a little deeper and re-stain the area, but I'm worried about messing it up. Or I'm thinking of maybe just putting a faint line of black paint in those lines and then putting a coat of poly on the whole thing.

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with it. Always being critical of my own work, I think the legs are ok, I should have made the shoulders a little farther back and the forearms/hands a little bigger, and maybe made the ears a little bigger. Since I'm trying to learn from doing this, what would you more experienced/experts on here do differently/better? Any thoughts on the 'tattoos', carve deeper or a little paint?

Thanks for looking again.