Owl - Day 1

I started my garden sculpture this afternoon. And so far I'm quite pleased with the results. It's both not quite as difficult as I expected and harder than I thought. Although the material (Hebel) is soft and doesn't take a lot of strength to work with, it is still very tiring to tap away with a hammer and chisel for two hours. It would be nice to be ambidextrous. I've taken it slowly, slowly because I don't want to chip off a huge piece in the wrong place and wreck it.

For my first ever sculpture - I'm thinking I'm doing okay.

My box of tools - the cheapest set of chisels (and it would have been easy to spend $100+) and files that I could find, my clay proforma, sandpaper, and a pencil.

A blank block

Marked up block and clay proforma. I realised later that I forgot the ridge between the eyes :-(

Feet, first pass. I've since made them a little deeper and a little wider.

Finished first side. The wings were originally the same density as the feet, but they look much better deeper and wider.

I'm not entirely happy with the eyes. Need to do some more fine work to even them out.

Here he is standing. The pencilled in wing on the side is obviously a little out of whack now I've actually carved the front.

And one just for a perspective of his true size. Eyes look really screwy because of the light coming in from the right.