An Advanced Guide to Making Wooden Gifts for Characters : Part A

If you've been getting started for a while, do you want to make lifelike character wooden gifts? This must be very suitable for a birthday or anniversary occasion to give your loved one a unique wooden gift tailor-made for him or her! Most importantly, it represents your heart and is a masterpiece made by your own hands after putting in the effort. This blog is Part A, teaching you the first four steps to start from scratch.

Step 1: Design the image.

Literally, design the image you want for your character and draw it. If you can't draw, refer to the drafts in this blog.

Step 2: Draw the draft.

Pick the right size of wood, the one used in the tutorial of this blog is 10x5x5cm.

Draw lines for the front, with the character's feet against the bottom of the wood. The character's chin, waist, trouser legs and other positions need to draw auxiliary lines against, easy to do the positioning later.

Draw lines for the side, this step is more difficult, please draw more auxiliary lines and refer to your design drawings (can be life photos).

Step 3: Saw large.

Tools: bench vise, saw, hammer, flat knife

Hold the wood in place with a bench vise and saw off the unused portion.

• Observe the direction of the wood grain, perpendicular to the wood grain direction is good for sawing.
• Follow the wood grain (top and bottom) is difficult to saw, this time we need to use a hammer + flat knife.

As shown in the picture, saw horizontally to a certain depth, knock vertically, the block will come down in one piece. Look at the whole thing and see what needs to be removed.

Step 4: Add line drawings.

Add line drawings to the sawed-off surface (the area marked by the red box) to help judge the form.

Summarize

The first four steps are the foundation of making any wooden gift, the image design and drawing draft determines your difficulty in cutting and carving, the more and clearer the auxiliary lines you draw will serve as the basis for your judgment when cutting, and you need to keep adding new auxiliary lines. In Part B, we will teach the next steps in making wooden gifts for figures.