tributesinwood

Lord Horatio Weatherbee

I’m moving slowly along on my game show idea featuring a British Admiral, a Sherlock Holmes type Investigator and a Cowboy. I did get one point wrong on my last post, though…the original 60’s and 70’s gameshow wasn’t called “What’s My Line” ( that was another show that I used to watch )…the one that I’ll be mimicking was called “To Tell The Truth.”

So, you’ll recall that I started off with the three heads that I carved, one of which looked like a Naval Officer…thus, Lord Horatio Weatherbee of the British Admiralty! I got things started with some clay to get a bit of an idea of what I was after as well as to set up a paper pattern to cut out the basswood blank.

From there, a combination of a Foredom “Typhoon” bit followed with a knife and gouge resulted in the basic hat and body. By the way, I found out in the process that the hat is called a “bicorne”…didn’t know that. I used the usual method of transferring lead pencil markings from the head to the hat to seat the hat very precisely on the head. Check out one of Lynn Doughty’s great videos on Outwestwoodcarving if you need a bit more of an explanation on this method. You can see that I also used a burning tool to clean things up as I went.

The final piece prior to painting looked like this.

For final touches, I added some copper wire which I twisted together into a braid by chucking the wire into a battery operated hand drill and operating it at a low speed. Brass decorative finishing nails and some acrylic paints with a satin urethane finished it off.