Unique Handmade Wooden Gifts: Goku Figure from Dragon Ball
Hello everyone, in this post we continue to share wooden gifts with anime characters. This time it's a popular character, the lovable Goku from Dragon Ball, and we have handmade a juvenile version of him in wood and spray-painted his clothes in color to pay tribute to this most iconic character.
Sketch design for Goku figure
Choosing a ready-made image as inspiration for the wooden gift is the easiest way, we used a front view of Goku with a large head scale, you can refer to our sketch or find a similar image to copy on your own. When choosing the size of the wood, you also need to base on your design, try to use a square or rectangular block of basswood for easy cutting. When sketching the Goku figure, the outline lines should be clearly visible, and you need to draw the facial details and clothing details, etc., so that you can use them as a reference for subsequent carving.
Cutting the block from the outside in
For complex wooden gifts, we use the vertical cutting technique, starting from the outside of the block and working inward to avoid cutting directly into the silhouette of the figure, especially if you choose a block that has texture or roughness on the edges, it should be disposed of first.
As shown in the picture, since Goku's head is bigger than his body, we can cut off the excess wood in a square shape. Once cut, the wood block becomes a T shape.
The next step is the hardest one, we must slowly sharpen the T-shaped wood block into the shape of Goku along the contour line. Note that we always keep the contour lines visible and leave a free space of about 0.5 centimeters. We still use the vertical technique in this step, with the hair part as shown a pentagram and the arms and body part as shown a trapezoid.
Carving out the side of the wooden figurine of Goku
From the front, we have a complete wooden figurine, but the figure is not three-dimensional and has no layers. In this step we will carve the sides of the wooden gift, although we do not have a sketch of the sides, just follow the sense of space. We will cut off the top and bottom layers of hair, leaving only the center, so that the figurine will no longer look like a square block when viewed from the side.
The neck is then treated in the same way, by sawing a line and then subsequently chipping off more wood to emphasize the face and body, making the neck thinner and in proportion to the human body. Both the hair and the neck area will inevitably cause the draft to be disrupted as we chip away, this is normal please don't worry about it.
Thinning the entire body part makes the head larger than the body when viewed from the side.
Starting from the edges, use a slanting technique to make the face smaller. The contour lines of the face from the previous sketch become an important reference for us.
Using the carving knife to sculpt the details of the wooden Goku
Using a small carving knife, we rounded out the originally angular wooden figurine and finished carving the shape of the hair, the details of the body parts, and the details of the clothes in turn. Smooth the face with sandpaper for painting the expression later. Finally, mix the colors you want, such as red or orange for the clothes and flesh for the body parts, and use a fine bristle paintbrush to color Goku.
Summarize
The wooden gifts shared here are extremely difficult to make, and we can only document the process as much as possible through motion pictures, but it is far from enough for wood carving beginners, so readers can consider this blog post only as a source of appreciation or inspiration, not a teaching guide. If you like our work very much, you can contact us on this site for customization or to purchase other in-stock products.
