Carved and Painted Keepsake Box

Hi guys, I'm Sasha. Thanks for joining me. Today I'm going to show you how I went from this, which is a pine box I got at Hobby Lobby, to this. Okay, this is carved all the way around and painted. So this is a gift for someone very special. It took a while, it took about a month from start to finish because of the detail in it. But if you keep watching I'll show you the bits that I used and step by step how I got it from a simple pine box to something you wouldn't even really know was pine. I've already drawn my pattern on and as you can see I made a few mistakes, which is normal, but and then I just filled in the spot to make it more clear for me when I'm carving. Now I'm going to do a relief carving on this to where the pattern is actually raised up and the surrounding area is carved down. So I'm going to begin with a small round carving bit on here. It's not the smallest I've got but it's small enough to get into an even smaller one. So this is the one that I'm using now, this is the one I was using before. Now sometimes we're going to have to carve against the grain. So if you have a really grainy area like this, I have a box just to support my hand. So anytime that you have extra grain that you're going to carve against, you want really good support so that you can control your tool. And one thing that I find helps with this, because this way I'm going to go down like this, and certain parts of the wood are softer than other parts. These light areas are softer than the dark areas. So if I'm not careful it ends up kind of going grr grr grr and getting really ripply, which I can smooth down later. But just for the sake of getting it done quickly, to have it look better too, I just have to naturally adjust my pressure. So as I watch here when I'm carving here, I'm going to push a little bit harder where this dark spot is, and then let up a little bit, and then push harder, and then let up, and push harder. So all of this dark stuff, for some reason it just takes a little bit more pressure or time depending on, you know, if you're in a really detailed area and you don't want to put too much pressure in case it catches and you go off into your part that you're not supposed to small round carving bit on here and I'm going to use this to add some detail and also go in where this is supposed to be over or under. I'm going to put those markings in and bring some of these bit. This is the other one I had on there. You can see it's very very tiny. It's the smallest one I have. I'm going to use this one to basically just do any edges or really really small areas. I'm using a diamond point bit here, oblong shape, and that I'm going to use to just point bit here. See how tiny it is? It's a ball point which is necessary. I'm going to smooth out the tiny tiny areas so I need a ball point diamond bit, but in order to do that I have to actually smaller ball point diamond point bit for more smoothing. This is a medium grit sandpaper and I'm just going to sand down all the edges by hand. This is a fine grit sandpaper that I'm going to use to smooth the entire piece and also remove any traces of my marker that I had used to draw the pattern.