Easy Easter Whittle -Full “How to” Woodcarving Tutorial

Hey guys, Doug here again. I've got a real fun quick little Easter Whittle for you today. This kind of stems back to the last little simple gnome video. Where I had this little guy, well I made all these little gnomes. But I had this one in particular and I had lots of questions about the bunny ears. So we're going to incorporate those bunny ears into today's project. This project has taken a bunch of turns but over the weekend I whipped up, I started out with a bunny like that as an egg. And then I decided to go with the egg shell. And as you can see all these guys, I've got a bunch here all different colors. And it's fun to give the Easter colors but you can see ear bent over, ear straight up. Double ear bent over. Alright so again like normal you can make it your own. Mix and match however you like to do it. But a very simple fun little project using a piece of basswood of course inch and a half square by four inches tall. Alright so giddy up. Alright so we've got a four inch piece of wood here. So let's try and find right exactly half. Alright. There we go. That's about half. Just rough. If you're off a little bit, no big deal. Alright. There's half. And then we're going to do half again. Let's find half. Roughly there. Okay. And what we're doing with this is about a fingers width. Maybe a quarter inch on each side of that center line like so. Like I said, roughly a finger. If you have a saw, this goes. But since I'm catering to the newer carvers, I will do one side myself. Now I'm going to put on my little thumb guard here because as you can see I've already got a little wound on that finger. So put my thumb guard on. But if you have a carving glove, put it on. I will be using a inch and seven eighths OCC tool knife. And there you go. Let's just jump right into this. So all I'm going to do. You probably know the drill by now. I'm going to go around and take all these corners off. Nice big corners. I'm going to the center of the line on both sides. So that the bottom is still the center line. Alright. And I'm just going to go across and take the between the corners out. Alright. I suggest that you watch this through once first because I'm going to go fairly quick. Try and keep your attention for more than the normal nine minutes you'd normally give me. Alright. So there you go. Halfway. We've just gone around and made that little V cut all the way around. Now this is the bottom. This is going to be the egg. It's so hard to hang on to. Might as well do it right off the bat. Just knock these corners off. It gives you a softer purchase when you're holding on to it and gripping gripping hard on it. We can do the bottom too just for the sake of it. See that? I'm just going across. Alright. Just rough. I can do the same thing on the corners. Corner. Corner off. Corner. Corner. Corner. Now to round this when we do these corners, we're going to do more of it later, but take that corner off then I'm going to take this corner off. If we just keep removing those corners, pretty soon we'll be starting to round it. Anyway, I'm already getting ahead of myself because it's going to be done down the road. Okay. Back up here. So there we go. We've got this. Like I said, these are the sides that are going to be removed. I'm going to do one side and by the power of editing, we'll have both sides done. We'll just go ahead and get the bigger corners off of here. So when we have a line like that, if I take this corner off, watching that line there. So if I just go along the edge of that line on both sides. You don't have to do it all in one sweep. You can do it many times. Now we have less to take off in the middle. Again, we can just work taking those corners off until we get the piece we want off. I'm going to cut down. Always know where your knife is headed. You don't want to stick it in your hand. And we're getting close. We're getting close. It doesn't have to be perfect. This is just roughing in. I think we can call that done. We've taken one side. Now I'll just do the other side. And there we go. Just like that. We've got both sides done here. What am I thinking? Where's my cheerleaders? Let me get these guys out here. Alright. That's better. Alright. Now, let's work on the ears first. Center of the ears. So what's an ear do? I'm just going to bring the ears over like so. So on both sides now, we can see the line there. I'm just going to bring that down right into the top of the egg there. Make both sides the same roughly. And then we're going to put these over here. So this one here, this is a little bit more difficult. So let's just do some big angle cuts. Same thing over here. Don't push too hard. You don't want to break it. You want to cut it. So especially here, this is going to be a little bit more difficult to cut once we get in there. But if you slice and pull you can cut the end grain easier. A little slicing cut rather than trying to push it through. Like that. See, I'm pushing. But if I can slice and pull, it works a lot better. Alright. We don't have to go too deep. So let's give some smoothness to this. We can knock all these corners off of here. Oh, we should talk about the flapping the ears. Alright. So let's say I'm going to give this some more shape here. The shape is really not critical. It's just kind of nice to rough up the edges. But for instance if we got this guy here, that ear is flapped over here. Now remember, no shame in going two up or two down. But for the video we're just going to do one down. So this is our ear. Roughly here. So if I want to have one flapped over, obviously the idea is that has to be down here. So that if that was folded back up, it's the same height as this thing. So if we're going to do that then we're going to have to take all this wood off of here. When I pull it towards me like that too, that's a nice strong strong grip. It's really hard to cut yourself like that. I think I'm going to move that up just a little bit. Alright. And then we're going to put that little cut in there like so. Might be a little premature on this but at least we haven't even separated the ears. But that's the that's the look we're going for right there. Let's separate these ears before we get too far. I'm just going to do a little V-cut with my knife. If you have a V-tool, you can use your V-tool. Scoot her up in there. I'm going to thin these down a little bit too. Bring these bottoms in. I want to get this one a little bit pointier. Alright. Now we can these are really straight up and down. Some of these I gave a little bit of a a little flare back. A little bend. You can separate the ears too and have one forward and one back or both forward or just leave them straight up and down. This flap ear though, we're going to take these corners off so that it looks like it's bent around. This one here, maybe we'll just bring this one back just a little bit. Clean up the V-cut again. Alright. We can let that go for a minute and go back down to the bottom. Right there is a nice spot for a little three quarter shadow. Make a little shadow in there. I'll show you the same thing in the back. See that there? If I just do a little three way cut, it's going to give a nice little shadow for the base of the ears. I think so. Alright. But, back up here and let's just start rounding it all off. I'm going to take all these corners off of here. On an egg, we've got a heavier bottom and a skinnier top. Like I said before, I'm just going to take off a corner and the next corner, another corner, and just keep working our way around. That's how we get it round. All the sharper edges, we're going to make the top just a little bit more narrow than the bottom. That train feels like it's taking forever to come through. The sound travels a lot better too when it's just about ready to rain. Spring is here. Easter is coming. Alright. So what do we got? We're going to look at that and say, well, it's a little bit heavy still, so we're going to thin that down again. Working our way across, we want to get all these flat spots into the rounding. I'm going to round it right up to the bottom of the ears. If we hit the ears, we can go back and clean them up after too. Okay, so now we've got a little bit more shape to it. Alright. Same thing on all these sides. I'm going to go around and knock all the corners off. I'm sure we all know what an egg shape is minus the flat spot to sit on. I've never seen an egg with a flat spot that will sit up straight. But then again, we're not going for a perfectly smooth either. We like knife cuts. We like facets. And we know that it's hand carved. Alright. Turn around. If the grain pulls one way, just turn it around and go the other way. Alright. What do we got here? A couple little bumps like that. Just take your time. Like I said, I'm trying to go a little bit faster to keep you entertained. Now, that's not too bad. We've got quite the facets in there. Alright. Now, we can also see what I was saying earlier. These are just painted. Just painted on the bottom. And like this one here, they're cut. So, let me just start out. We'll do the egg cut. And that is just no rhyme or reason. Some are higher than lower. I'll do a couple here and then I'll go and finish it on my own. We're just doing these little up and down. So, all I'm going to do there is stick my knife in. I'm giving it a little bit of an angle. Down and back up. Alright. Then I'm just going to go across. Take it out. And then I'm going to go and clean that up again. Alright. Let's go around. But, like I said, it's not necessary. You can do a nice... If you're having a lot of fun just painting different designs, there's so... Have you ever researched egg designs? There's so many that you can do. You don't have to do this step at all. But, if you do this step, that means you're going to narrow the egg again. So, why don't I just clean this up a little bit. But now that I've started, I might as well finish it. Just go all the way around like so. And then when I come back I'll have it all done and we'll do the ears and the face. Alright. There we go. Our little egg shell bottom done. Like I said, remember that if you go with the egg shell, you've got to thin the rest of it down. Basically take off the thickness of the egg shell all the way back up. And you can see how that's kind of rounding right to the base of the ears. And they can even go in a little bit more. But we'll leave it for now. The bottom is round. Is it perfectly round? No. Not perfectly round. But you can see the roundish shape. So, I think we're in pretty good shape. So, I'm going to have to do this little folded ear a little bit more here. Get that down in there. I want that to pop out a little bit more. There we go. Alright. That's looking good. Now, what we're going to do here, I'm just going to draw a little line here. Same as here. We're going to set those ears in. Now, here again, you can if you have a v-tool, you can take a v-tool and run it up in here both ways. Or, if you want to go with a gouge, you can take a gouge and make it round. And then maybe you make a little cut inside of it. It's all up to you. You can go as thin as you want to go or as much work as you want to put into it. But, I'm just going to do... Actually, I'm going to finish shaping the ear first. Like this. Lots of hard edges on here still. I'm going to take all these edges off here. But, it is basically just a little bit of a hollowing of the ear. Let's get some texture on all these. Even if you're not doing anything, you're just adding some more knife facets just to give it some character. Okay. We're going to dig this right out. Like I said, if you've got a v-tool, you can run your v-tool up here. Not into your thumb. I will tell a story on the podcast this week about this thumb. Always know where your fingers are. I like a knife. You can just kind of keep working it in. Trying to stay at the bottom line. We like to keep it the same so we don't double cut everything. Slicing it up. I'll give her one more here. Now I'm choking up on my knife so that I have complete control over it. I can't slide. You can just keep on going as deep as you would like. There we go. Maybe a little bit more of a V on the top edge. I like it. Just like so. Same thing here. I'm just going to kind of undercut that right under that fold. I'm going to put some stop cuts in there. I'm just going to pop that chip out of there. See what we got. Not bad. I like to get a little bit up this way. Pencil lines can go. Alright. Let's do this one more time. That should be good. Not quite. Not quite. A little fuzzy in there. There we go. I'm going to bring that over just a little bit more. A little bit more this way. There we go. If you want to do a little shadow cut under there you can do that too. It will help it pop out. A little bit rough in there. I'm going to go the other way. A little bit of a grain issue in there. I'm going to separate that a little bit more. Still don't like it. There. Now I like it. Now I like it. Okay. That's basically the ears. You can do little tiny V cuts if you want. Give it some shadow. Then we're going to move right into the nose and the face. Now if you look behind me, the nose I wasn't even thinking triangle nose until I got to this guy. Then when I got to this guy I finished him all up with a triangle nose because these are all little round button noses. Then I realized after I had him all painted I didn't get him any teeth. Which is fine. Teeth or no teeth. He still looks like a rabbit because he's got big honking ears on him. I've got a little bit of meat here so I'm going to put the nose a little bit higher here. I think we can stay with that button nose. All I'm going to do is cut like so. Looks like I'm making a square but we're just going to knock the corners off. You've got a little button nose. Slide your knife around for clean up. It doesn't have to stick out too far but I think it's time little doggie gets his glasses on. Now I'm just going to run my knife all around it. Just kind of slice up to it. I'm going to take all the edges off and just leave a little button there. Button nose complete. These eyes are all just painted. I just put two dobs. This one is a little bit crooked which is on purpose. You can use a toothpick or if you have a little stylus. Just two black dots with a little white. Then from here I just came down a little straight line and I brought it over and I gave little wing cuts on here because I'm really going to undercut that whole mustache or mouthy face. These are just painted lines too. Let's do that first. I'm going to put a little stop cut here and one under the nose. Just do a little V cut up to the nose and a little V cut down into the nose. Now I'm going to do these little end cuts here. These little stab cuts like so. I'm going to follow that around right into that. I just lost the tip of my knife in there. Would you look at that. There it is. There it is. That's the tip of my knife. Now that is totally on me. I take full responsibility for that because most of these OCC tools come with a little flat edge and I always go ahead and I always round them to a point. We'll just carry on like nothing ever happened. A little round cut. Now we're just going to come up underneath there and give her a little slice. A little slice right into that other cut. These pencil lines over here. Now I'm going to give them some teeth. A little bit bigger on these so you can see nice and clear. I kind of like that tombstone shape. Not straight up and down. I'll show you what I'm talking about. Just not two square teeth. I like a little bit of a camp back like that. You can see I'm just cutting around it. A little chip here and there. A little V cut on the center line. Minus the pencil lines. Alright. If you want to do a little tiny V in between you can do that too. Not necessary but you can. That's pretty much it. Let me grab my spray bottle. So I spray that because that's how Gene Messer taught me. It just shows all the shadows better. There's going to be a little bit of clean up here and there but overall I'd say we got it. I'd say we got our little bunny. Obviously I use Easter colors on these guys here but you can do polka dots. The sky is the limit. You can do whatever you want to do. You know what? Wasn't that easy and fun? It looks like you got something there. Nice little Easter whittle. Wasn't too hard. There you go. When I paint these I wet the paint. So if I use a pink I'll add about 7 or 8 drops of water to a drop of paint just to give it more of that stain. You can still see the grain in there. I put a little bit of a black wash around here just to do some highlights as you can see. A little bit of blue in the ears. So many options but if you want to just paint the egg. I painted this before I ever decided to cut it in and that's how they kind of evolve. Make yours evolve and make them your own. That is our little Easter whittle project. So there you go. That was a fun little project and before I go I just want to say thanks to anyone who bought me coffee this week or to those who did. I always appreciate that. It's a little perk for me when someone bought me a coffee. So let's have a last look at these on the way out the door. See that. Remember this is the triangle nose on this one. Pink guy. Little blue guy. Alright guys. I hope that was quick and to the point and I hope you have fun making this little project. Until the next one Thanks for watching and I'll catch you later. See you guys.