How to Carve a Fairy With Pretty Wings
- 1). Draw four rough-sketch drawings of your mental image of your fairy onto a piece of plain white card-stock paper. With the paper laid out horizontally, draw a left-hand view of your fairy on the left side of the paper. Draw the front view of your fairy immediately to the right of the first drawing, then continue with drawing a right-side view. Draw an image of the back of the fairy to the far right of the paper. Use these drawings as guides to detailing each area of the fairy once you begin your rough-cutting of the wood block.
- 2). Use coarse whittling saws and knives from a high-quality wood carving set to carve out a crude shape of the fairy and its wings. It may be easier for you to carve wood away while allowing wings to protrude from the block of wood first before concentrating on the body of the fairy.
- 3). Carve out the finer shape details of the fairy's wings, and then do the same for the head. Leave the head slightly larger than it will be after carving out the ears, hair details, eye/nose/mouth indentations and neck. Continue on to fine-carving the shape of the torso, waist, arms, legs, hands and feet. Use a powered rotary tool to smooth away any ridges left behind by your whittling knives.
- 4). Indent the initial ear, eye, nose, mouth, finger, toe, arm, leg, and wing depression areas using any necessary variety of "spoon" carving tools which are designed to gently and slowly scoop away wood for the making of such indentations. Use a carving awl to create hair and eyebrow strands as necessary.
- 5). Use a powered rotary tool sanding disk attachment and further sand down all areas of the fairy to a fine detail, using a cutting wheel attachment if necessary to remove larger portions of wood from underarms, legs and feet. Cut and sand using the rotary tool until the entire fairy has the fine details you envision, also matching the details to the drawings you made on the paper.
- 6). Sand down intricate areas by hand, using sandpaper. It may be necessary to cut small squares, circles or triangles out of a sheet of sandpaper in order to finely sand areas which may be hard to get to with a full sheet. At this stage, sand only by hand so you may adjust speed, pressure and angle to finalize your wooden fairy to your liking.
- 7). Decorate and paint your completed fairy sculpture with paints and decorative items.
