Final Detailing
Up to this point I’ve been placing the individual pieces in place temporarily with a glue gun just so that I could get the general shape and location of items figured out. Now, I’m taking the next step of detailing each piece to it’s final shape before painting.
Working from the “centre” of the pile ( which happens to be the crate ), I’ve started by adding a few wood cracks and various knicks into the crate with a knife and chisel. I’ve also included a few nail heads here and there where you’d imagine the crate is held together. To make the nail heads, I took a piece of copper tubing ( about an 1/8″ diameter ) and sharpened the circumference of one end with a fine file. I then fastened it to the end of a soldering gun with some fine copper wire. With the soldering iron heating up the tubing, I was able to pretty quickly burn the nail heads into the wood.
The back of the crate was drilled out for a 1/4″ dowel as was the back of Mervin. I did the same thing to locate the mattress against the crate, which you can see in the photo below. Once everything is painted, these dowel pins will be epoxied in place and will give the carving a lot of strength.
To get the detail into the mattress, I used a knife to cut fairly deep diamonds with a four pointed centre depression. Then with a shallow chisel, I smoothed out the contour from the outline of the diamonds to the centre depression. I think it turned out pretty well. In fact, I’m going to have to rearrange some of the other items to make sure that you can see the mattress once everything is piled on!
tributesinwood 