How to Carve an Easter Island Head -Simple Knife Only Quick Tutorial

Hey guys, Doug here again with another fun, very easy, great beginner wood carving project. And that's Easter Island Heads. Now, I don't know what Easter Island Heads are, nobody really does, but the best guess is that they're monuments to great chiefs and leaders of the past on Easter Island. But they're amazing. They're amazing. Some are from 3 feet tall to 30 feet tall, and just to think of the ingenuity of them carving them out of the quarry, bringing them to a place, and erecting them, standing them up is beyond our comprehension. But we can do it with a piece of wood, and that's what we're going to do today. This idea started back a couple years ago when I did one of those soapstone live on a live stream. And since then I've done a few more different ones, from little babies to the bigger ones, butternut, and painted up. So this is what we're going to make today. And like I said, this rivals a 5 minute wizard. It's such a fun, easy, quick carving, but it's such a cool looking piece. So let's just get right at it with our piece of wood that is an inch and a half square by 4 inches tall. All right, let's get our little piece of wood here all marked up. We're going to work off the point again. And just take a look at that, I wrote the measurements on there. But real quick, all measurements, measuring from the top, down 3 quarters, that's the brow line. Down another 3 quarters is the bottom of the nose, so 19 mil, 38 mil, 3 quarters, inch and a half. So an inch and a half from the top, bottom of the nose, and 3 quarters from the top, the brow line. All right. Then we're going to mark the ears, down 12 mil, and 50 mil, down half inch, 2 inch. See that? Okay, and then our neck line is at 2 and 3 quarters from the top, down 2 and 3 quarters. That's it. So take your knife, and your freshly strapped knife, and take your carving glove if you have one, and let's just dig right in. Let's go dig right at it, bottom of the nose, right there. Bam. I'm going to come up, right up under there. Brow line, same thing. Straight down, and I'm going to come up, maybe a little bit deeper, right, eventually we're going to get right to the tip of the nose, all right? I'm going to dig that right back. Okay. See where we're headed? A little bit of an angle is a good idea too, as soon as it's straight, just a little bit of a cant there. Same with the nose. All right? So we want to get those down. The deeper we go, the more shadow we get, all right? So let's get that in there nice and deep. Shadow good. All right? There we go. Might as well, that neck line, just going to do a little V, probably closer to the bottom edge than the top, but if you get that V in the center of the line, that's fine too. Let's just do that. Center of the line is the V, all right? Just to have everything marked out, just kind of come across. Come across real quick. This wood's a little bit tougher too. People always say my wood is so soft, but it's not, my knife is sharp, my hands are, my paws are bigger, and I just make it work. So if I get a tough piece, I bully through it, and otherwise I just have a good go. Now, I don't like grabbing the corners with these sharp edges. We don't like points, so if we got our marks on there, let's just flatten those edges just to soften that up a little bit, all right? Just a little bit, okay? Just took off my mark. See? That's what I meant. So anyway, I can guess that, but let's put one cut on the ear very carefully. Just want to mark, cut everything so that we kind of know where everything goes, and as usual, we fine-tune later, but before we cut out our pencil lines, it's always nice to know where everything's going to go, all right? So I would guess that's here. Is that here? Sure. Oh, it looks close enough. All right. So I'm going fairly, fairly deep on the ear. As you can see, maybe that's a good 3 16ths. We can always go deeper later. But again, we're getting sidetracked on the ears. Let's get that face set in there better, okay? Now, this is going to be a little bit wider, so we're going to come across a bit of an angle, but not too much. It's fairly straight. We're going to bring that nose across like that. Same on this side. Let's kind of find that over there. Okay. All right. Now, we're going to lose a lot of that. Now we've got a good profile, okay? Maybe the same thing with the chin, too. Okay. Now, our center of our nose, we only want maybe a quarter inch total. We're going to come down. We're going to go. My knife is not straight. It's not in. It's just a hair out. And I'm going to try, well, let's widen this nose a little bit. All right. See that? Let's go right across. We can make a nose smaller, but we can't make a nose bigger, so we'll start big. All right. See that? Same on this side. There we go. See? Fairly wide, so now I'm just going to go take the edges off. That's not too bad. But I do want that a little bit deeper, so let's go a little bit deeper here. A little bit deeper. I think we'll probably narrow that nose up a little bit more, so. All right. Like I said before, the depth gives the shadow, so the deeper, the more shadow. So I'll clean that cut up. All right. I took a bit of that point off the nose. Let's bring that nose up just a little bit on the edges. All right. See that? A little bit heavy there. We need a little bit of a back brush. But what we've got to do is, let me show you this finished guy. We're going to round the forehead back and from the back of the neck, okay? Let's just start rounding the head all the way around. Okay. Now from the back here, nose, turn right around. And we can make that a lot there. I'm going to bring that back of the head closer to the back of the ears. And we're just going to round that over, too. There we go. See that? Looks fairly even. We haven't got our ears set, so we can't really fine-tune that perfectly. But there we go. Now, as far as these ears go, let's just take... We've got that little flat spot there. We can keep it in a little bit. All I'm going to do is I'm going to take my knife and I'm going to come straight down the ear. I'm going to come straight across. Be very careful. It's going to pop at some point. There we go. See that? There we go. Now, if I'm happy with that, I'll leave it. But if I want to go a little bit deeper, I'll go a little bit deeper. All right. There it is. All right. Same thing on the other side, but I can do that off-camera, no problem. And now I can finish rounding that. Okay. Now, let's get this chin set. I want that fairly deep. Nice and deeply set. Same on the sides. The sides can go way in. If your wood's smaller, you can do the same thing and keep a smaller base. They've dug up these guys before, and they actually have a bit of a body on them. But we only see the heads, so we're only carving the heads. Don't be in a big hurry like me, but you can take your time after you know what you're doing. But for video's sake, we want to keep it moving along. All right. See, I've got a fairly flat here, so I'm going to go a little bit higher just to give that chin a little bit more prominence. You know what I mean? By sticking out, coming a little bit higher. There we go. Keep your cuts clean, and you won't have to go back and clean them up after. Keep all the little fuzzies out. All right. There we go. All right. So if I look at that right now, I would say, I want to bring that up a little bit to the ears. All right. Around. Soften that chin. All right. Okay. I might as well just do this ear too at the same time. Let's just be done with it. I was going to do it off air, but let's just do it. Be done with it. There we go. Clean that cut up. And all I do with these is just kind of imagine a 45 degree angle. Come down like so. All right. A little bit rounder. Take off these lines. Kind of blend it with the face. All right. Now I'm going to clean up the brow. It's going to come in just a little bit of an angle. All right. A little bit deeper again. If you wanted to, if you want just a little bit more shadow, just stick your knife in here. Just a little bit. And then just a little whisker under there. That just gives that little extra little depth. A little extra shadow. Just a little whisker. There. All right. So if you're happy with your nose and your brow, you got your ears set, let's look at the mouth. The mouth is just a straight across mouth. You know, closer to the nose than the bottom of the chin. So I say right about here. All right. Just going to run my knife back and forth. Take a V cut from the top. Or a V cut angle cut. A little bit bigger. And then I can draw a line just to show you. So just below, we're just going to do a little same thing. Just a little lower lip. We're not rounding. We're just pretending this is all a cut in stone so we're not getting too perfect. You know, and for all intents and purposes, that is our Easter Island head. But I'm going to keep going around, taking off all these, any lines, any cut lines that are too sharp. Now we can go looking around. Take the corner off the back. You can run your knife around this whole thing just to take off the uncut, unpolished by your blade is what I'm saying. You can go around and just kind of slice, you know, just to give it that carved look all around. But we don't need to do that for video's sake. All right. I'm going to bring the neck in just a little bit more. I like the neck to be kind of down to the chin a little bit more. These are not historical replicas. It's just the essence of the Easter Island head. I like this. It's such a fun, easy carving. And yeah, anybody can do it. But it's not like it has to look like a specific person or a thing. It's a carved head. So under the nose, if you want to, you can do a couple little cuts like that if you want. Put in a nostril. Put in nostrils. I don't know if we need a little snot drop, but you can do that too. If you had a gouge or just a knife. Make a little snot drop. And I love saying that because someone's going to come and tell me the proper word. But I do like saying snot drop. But yeah, a gouge would have been better. But anyway, that's it. That's it. So easy and fun. Like I said, you can just keep on playing with it all you want. Rounding over your corners and whatever. But for the quick and dirty, that is your Easter Island head. Don't touch the back of the ears at all. Like I said, you can make cut marks all over the wood if you want to. Take your time and you're probably not going to make five of them. So you've got time to play with it. But there you go. So like I said, this one here was made out of butternut. Which is a real nice carving wood. And it just has some feed and wax on it. This one here is basswood. But I just put some linseed oil on it. This guy here was painted with a grey wash. And then I took a very light black wash. And hit all the shadows. Anywhere there's a little cut or whatever. Even the neckline. Just a little black wash and then a grey. Just to really darken up the shadow areas. And then I actually, I don't know if the camera will pick it up or not. But I actually took a paintbrush and I flicked. Just kind of spattered some grey and some black spots. To make it look stone. Because I had this guy on the brain. With the stone look to it. But anyway, there you go. So like I said, couldn't be easier, couldn't be funner. And it's actually a cool looking little thing to put on your shelf. So beginner, yes. But still fun and cool. So there you go. Thanks to anybody who bought me a coffee this week. And YouTube has another extra little thing. I think it's called Super Thanks. It's actually right under the video. So thanks to any of you who clicked that button. But otherwise, I've been busy. And I've got a lot going on right now. But I hope to be back with you soon. Sooner than the last video. And yeah, we'll get back on a more even rotation. So thanks for watching. And I'll see you in the next one. See you guys.