tributesinwood

Some New Ideas

Over Christmas I did a bit of extra carving on my latest project…a British Infantry Soldier from 1812.  My daughter gave me a very nice leather apron for carving and I’ve been using it since Christmas morning.  It’s nice to wear to keep the wood chips off and give you a bit of protection from a slipped carving knife.  Of course, it’s also quite the fashion statement.

The soldier will be more of a bust than a full figure caricature.  It’s something that I’ll attach to a wooden base.  Although it will have arms holding onto a musket, I think that it will still qualify as a bust in that category at wood shows.  We’ll see…I’m just learning the ropes.

The soldier bust has a back-pack right now, a canteen and an ammunition bag.  From diagrams, I suspect that the back-pack must have had a wooden frame interior as it was very box-like and didn’t look like it would have been comfortable at all to wear.  The canteen appears to have been made of wooden slats on a circular metal rim…a bit like a wooden barrel.  The ammunition pouch was just a heavy leather pouch with a metal catch of some sort.  It looks like an industrial strength purse.

I’m working on his head and hat right now and I still have to carve up the cloth bag that the soldiers at the time carried.

I’ll get a photo of my progress up on the site shortly.