tributesinwood

Painting the Wheels

You’ll remember that I actually cut out the wheel parts initially with a hole saw and then glued the pieces together and detailed them a bit on a lathe.

Today I used a wood burner to create deeper ridges for the treads and the whitewalls on the tires.  These ridges allowed me to be a little less cautious with the painting, as the thinned paint would only flow as far as the ridge and no further…so, you didn’t get too much bleeding of one paint colour into the next.

I think it’s all looking pretty good for what I’d consider as the base coat.  Once I detail the wheels in a bit more with a variety of highlight colours, I think that they’re going to look pretty good.  At least the little hounds look happy.

Finishing Up The Base Coats

I think I’ve got the two hounds painted about where I want them.  I used a lot of different browns in their coats…milk chocolate, asphaltum, linen…and a bit of yellow ochre to soften the browns.  The little passenger has a mottled pattern on her back as well as a larger “spot” of asphaltum with a few washes of carbon black.  This weekend, I’ll seal the acrylic on the hounds with satin urethane.  This last step really brightens up the colours even further.

You can see from these photos that I’ve taken the first few steps at painting the car.  Right now, I have a cherry red base coat that’s starting to look really nice.

As usual, just click on the photo to make it bigger.

Completing Arms and Goggles

I’ve added the arms in my usual way.  Aside from the arm that is wrapped around the back of the driver and is carved directly into the wood, the other three arms were added separately so that the direction of the wood grain runs along the arm giving it the greatest strength.

You might be able to see from the photo that each arm had been placed in its rough location and then drilled through the shoulder with a 1/4″ bit followed by a wood dowel.  This helped me ensure that while I was fitting the arm to the body the arm was ending up in the exact same spot every time I removed it for shaping.  The shaping was done by shading the body with lead pencil and then letting that lead transfer to the “unleaded” arm.  The resulting marks on the unleaded arm showed where the high spots were and they were simply cut away with a chisel or knife.  Doing this several times mates the two pieces together very closely.

You can also see from the photo that the eyes within the goggles are starting to emerge.  The driver is fairly wide-eyed and his friend is squinting and howling.

Back to Wood Carving

The clay hounds have been left behind now and I’ve moved on to their wood versions.

I didn’t take a photo of it, but what I did was hold the clay figures up to a piece of paper and outlined the side view shape onto the paper.  This takes a bit of eye-balling as you want to make sure that the lines that you draw are accurate and as close to a 90 degree angle to the paper.  With a little practice and some measurements from the clay to the paper just to check that everything is true, you end up with a side view that you can take to the bandsaw.

If you’re careful, you can do the same for the front view by holding the clay figure now up against the profile that you just sawed out on the bandsaw.  This is a bit trickier as the saw pattern left on the figure is contoured and not a flat plane.  Again, with a bit of practice it’s possible to get a nice pattern developed.  Just remember that when you take this to the bandsaw you will not have the flat plane that you originally had to rest on the bandsaw table.  What I did was to lightly glue onto the back a portion of the profile that I had cut off, so that I now would have a flat surface to cut against.

At that point, out came the Typhoon bits and the Foredom tool for some rough shaping followed by the chisels and knives.  Here’s where I am at this point.