Carving a Simple Woodspirit - Part 6

Alright, now you can see that I've gone on and put in the rest of the hair, tried to keep a good flow to it and everything, and it's starting to shape up. Well now we're going to go ahead and do the eyes. I'm going to come right alongside the nose here and I'm going to put a mark, that's the inside corner of his eye, and I'm going to come out about right there, and that's just about the size of the nose, I'm going to put that mark there. And I'm going to come right here, about where the center of the brow is, I'm going to let this eye slant down, like so, so I'm going to draw me a line. Okay, now you can take your dividers, if you really want to, and measure all this, but for the sake of time I'm not going to do that. Line him up here, make the eye about the same length, look at him right here, draw in my line. Okay, and that pretty much defines my eyes. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the simple eye on this one, if you want a better eye, you can go to YouTube and look at my eye carving tutorial, or you can buy the DVD, either one, it doesn't matter. But I'm going to start up in here, and I come up about a 45 for a little while, and I want this eye to be squinty, I don't want him to have a big eye, so I'm going to come and draw that down just like that, and I'm going to come below, and I'm going to come, now, I'm going to come almost diagonally to make the biggest part of the eye below it coming down right here, and I'm going to come just like that, and I'm going to come over here on the other side, and I'm going to try to draw as much as possible the same eye, okay, and take a look at that, that looks pretty good. Now I'm going to take my detail knife, and I'm going to come and stick it right in the corner here, make that deep, and I'm going to come and stick it right in the corner there, make a nice cut, and I'm going to make a nice straight up and down stop cut, and I'm going to come all the way down to here, alright, and turn him over where I can get to him, and I'm going to do the same thing right here. Now I'm going to take this knife, I'm going to stick it right, I'm going to come out about a third of the way, and I'm going to run it in at an angle, and take out that little chip. We're actually carving what I call a football eye here, do the same thing on the other side, make a stop cut here, that little chip should, well guess what I just did, I just broke my knife, okay, it just so happens I got another one sitting right here, got a piece of metal stuck in there I think, having a hard time getting that corner cut out, because I think I got a piece of my blade stuck right in there, alright, now then I'm very carefully going to kind of try to round that eyeball up at the top right here, on both sides, it's hard for me to see this, I usually wear my magnifiers when I do this, but because I'm wearing a microphone headset I can't do that, and I'm going to round it down in the bottom here very carefully, you'll notice I'm just taking little shavings actually, and there is an eye, very plain, very simple eye, but it looks pretty good I think, I don't know how well you can see that, but there it is, now then, but I'm not going to leave it quite like that, I can't hardly stand that, if you've got it you can use a very small V tool to do the next part, although I'm going to cheat, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to come right in here, and I'm going to delineate the top of his brow, or excuse me, his eyelid right here, you're going to come down here, you're going to come down here, now you've got to go from center out, and center in on this, you don't want to try to cut that in one line, because it'll be going against the grain part of the way, and it'll chip out, get back in that cut, and come and go completely out here, now what I'm using here, and you could do that with a knife I suppose, but it is so much easier, and looks so much better to do it with a small V tool, this is about a 1mm V tool, came out of a Rammelson micro set, but you use whatever you have, then I'm going to come underneath the eye, now what I'm going to do is, I'm going to come back and kind of lay this back just a little bit, so I've got room to, I'll round that down a little bit more too I think, I've got room to do this, and what I'm going to do, I'll show you, I'm going to come down here and put a bag, I'm going to come like this, and this will come back up, now I'm going to cut something here in that first, then I'm going to put another line right here, and another line right there, to add a little detail to this eye, but what I'm going to do first is right here where I made that cut, I'm going to take a little scoop, so I can tuck that bottom eyelid under the top eyelid, it just looks better, okay, I'm going to take my tool and I'm going to start in the center, I'm going to come right here, like so, and I'm going to get right underneath, I'm going to come and almost go straight up at the end, and that puts that bag in his eye, alright, and I'm going to come and put another little line right alongside it there, and I'm going to drop below that line here, and I'm going to put another one coming up, and I hope you can see that I'll turn it several different ways so that you can see that I put some wrinkles and bags under his eye, now I'm going to come out here and put a crow's foot, I'm going to let that come out and turn down, and I'm going to go and do another one, let it turn up, and I'm going to drop right under here and I'm going to put a couple little squiggly lines, just to give him a little detail, a little wrinkle detail right there, you see. Now, I'm going to go back and get my 1-8 number 7 here, and I'm going to do a negative eye, I'm going to stick it right in there, now I'm not going to center this, I don't like that thousand yard stare, and I'm just going to let it round up, kind of, see how I'm just kind of rounding that up, and I'm also pushing it down in the wood, take my knife and make me a nice neat cut right up in there, I have to work it a little bit more here, like so, I have to work it a little bit down in the bottom, get my little stop cut a little cleaner, and there you have, I hope you can see that, a nice negative eye, now you're going to come over here and do the same thing, and you'll notice, I kind of, well actually I put it right in the center, but you're going to cut the same eye, now I'm not going to do that, I'm going to let you all, I'm going to do that off camera, but I am going to do the next part, which, actually you could leave all this area alone, but I like to round it up a little bit, take my 5-16 number 7, and you have to kind of, here again, start in the middle and go down, and just kind of, what I'm doing is just knocking the edge off that brow, make it look a little better, and I'm going to come back right here and do the same thing, ok, also, if you decide to put some eyebrows on this guy, this gives you a place to do it, so, and it looks better to you, alright, just kind of rounding that little bit right there, and then you can actually take this and turn it over and put a little divot right here, ok, then I can take my miniature V-tool, and I'll come out here, and here again, I make these a little bit of an S-curve, and as they go out, I'll lay them down, so I'll come right here, and this takes a very small V-tool, the way I do them, now some people do them with a bigger one, and if you don't have a small V-tool, well, just do it with a big one and cut it light, and that'll work, and see, as I go out, and I start curving it back towards the outside of the face, and you can just put in a few of those in there, and then I'm going to also take this while I've got it, and put a few forehead wrinkles in there, and a forehead wrinkle is kind of a modified W, kind of goes up and down and out, like so, you can see that very good, ok, and I put two or three in, each one of them is a little bit shorter, wrinkles can be all kinds of neat, I wouldn't necessarily say this is anatomically correct, but it looks pretty good on a green man, or on a wood spirit, put a few wrinkles in like that, ok, got a few wrinkles, now, I'm also going to come back and start doing some detailing, I'm going to come right in here, put a good deep stop cut, and then I'm just going to take my knife and I'm going to lay it back a little bit, and I'm going to kind of cut this line, make it show up better, and just cut a little chip out of there and make that show up better, and then actually I will make sure I've got a good line around, all the way around his mustache, and I'll take my knife and lay it back and just cut a little sliver, and this makes the mustache stand out a little bit more, especially if you stain it or something like that, and I'll do the same thing, do the same thing on the inside of the mustache, just lay that knife back, cut a little sliver out of there like that, go the other direction down here, and it's kind of hard to see probably on the camera, but that does make the mustache stand out a little bit more, like so, any place you have a change, a transition, I like to put a good clear stop cut to it, and same thing on the side of the face, you may have to work on it a little bit more, I want a good clean transition, so I'll come back and put my stop cuts and cut back to them, that is the secret to a clean carving, a good clean stop cut, and cut back to it. Okay, now I'm going to go off camera, let me show you one other thing, now down in here like where your mustache hits here, you can come back and kind of follow that groove right there, just right off the end of it, and then here again you can come back and take just a narrow slice really, and you can do that on all the tips, and you just kind of make them stand out is what you do, and it looks really good, like so, so you can do that same thing here, just make you a little cut there, and it's details like this, it turns your simple wood spirit into a really nice one, now I'm making this short, so I'm not going to go into that too much, one other thing, you'll come back and of course smooth up the face a little bit with a tool or even a little piece of sandpaper, although I think sandpaper is cheating, so I don't ever use it, and before you know it, you'll have yourself a good looking green man, when I come back this is basically going to be finished, and we'll talk about some details, some other things to clean up, and this will be the finish, hopefully, there you go. Okay folks, here we are, here's the finished wood spirit, you notice I finished carving in his eyes, and I also added a couple of little v-tool cuts on each side, and cleaned him up, now I never touch this with sandpaper, I clean him up a little bit with just some scraping, one thing and another, and then I took him and took some dish soap and put it in a hot, put it in a dish of hot water, and took a toothbrush and just cleaned him up, and you might even notice some little dark spots, that's where it's still wet, took it in there and took a hair dryer to it, and there you go, that makes a good looking simple wood spirit, now you can use this wood spirit like I did here off the corner, or you could carve this wood spirit on a log, driftwood or on a cane, if you use a cane, what you do is you lay out the area where you're going to put your face, go ahead and 45 it, just like I did here, that keeps the face from looking flat, well I hope you enjoyed this video, and I hope you learned something from it, and this is the third in my series of carving off the corner, y'all stay tuned, I think I'm going to do an Indian next, it may be a week or two before I get started on it, but y'all just hang in there, and this is Gary McDaniel, Three Crosses Wood Carving, saying y'all come carve with us now, you hear? Goodbye.