Hair

I finished up the majority of the hair last night. Still got some more to do on the legs the neck. Here's what it looks like now. I took the first picture last night right on my bench like I normally do. I took another this morning with the picture in the light booth Stacy got me for Christmas. I never realized that it would make that much of a difference.

Back to the ear

The ear on the right side of the lion's face is what's going to give this picture real 3 dimension. It's going to be the part that sticks out the farthest from the background. By having it stick out this far, it will help make the lion's head look like it is turned. So, at this point, I took the scalpel and sliced the ear loose all the way back to where it would be attached to the head.

As you can see here, it's cut through the leather and into the putty below. This scar will be filled in with a thin layer of putty. The back of the ear will also be shaped with putty.

To get the putty to stick to the ear, I first coat the leather with rubber cement.

Putty is applied to the back of the ear to give it shape, and to get it to stand up. Putty is also used to cover the scar in the leather where the ear was cut loose. Then when the putty has dried for awhile, the hairing knife is used to put texture over the putty helping to hide the scar.

Then a little water is added to the front side of the ear so that it softens up a little and I can shape it.

And here is how the ear looks now.

Hairing around the eye

Now I've moved on to the hair around the eye. Under the eye, I started by "picking" with the hair knife like I did on the nose. Then after a few rows of the really short hair, I started to cut in slightly longer hair.

This hair is then sliced underneath and separated in the same way we did the longer hair inside the ear, but on a smaller scale.

I take a scalpel or a modeling tool with the end sharpened up to slice under the top eye lid.

To do the eye lash, I cut a piece of light cardboard (business card etc.) and tuck it into the cut line of the eyelash. This will keep me from accidentally making a cut on the eye ball. A cut there is almost impossible to smooth out or cover up.

With the cardboard in place, use the scalpel to cut in individual eye lashes. These cuts need to be really close together to make them look realistic.

Next I'll continue on with the hair above the eye, being careful to watch the direction of the hair and the length.

More work on the lion

I decided that I wanted a little more stretch on the jaw of the lion so I wetted that area on the front of the leather, then used a large marble to push this area up from the backside. You can see that the putty while dry, is still flexible enough to allow you to form and shape it. The cavity is once again filled with the putty mixture.

Ok, now I'm ready to start the hairing. I started right above the nose putting in really short hairs with the multi blade hairing knife. The short hair is made by stabbing the tips of the blades into the leather and pulling up.

Then I moved over to the ear. The long hairs inside the ear are made by making long cuts with the hairing knife.

Then the scalpel is used to slice carefully under the cuts we just made with the hairing knife. This will allow the hair to be lifted up.

Then, again using the scalpel, slice between each individual hair. This will allow them to really stand up and be shaped.

Here you can see how the leather takes the shape of individual hairs.

Tooling the grass (background on the lion)

One of the things that I really like about Robb's video lessons is that he has already done all the "thinking". I spent a couple days working on the grass, on and off. It was mostly a lot of beveling and backgrounding, kind of boring. The challenging part was to make sure that where grass blades crossed over each other, they came out on the other side and didn't end abruptly or just disappear. I had to go over some of it several times to get some depth. I'm still not finished with that part, I'll do some more cleaning up later and add some modeling to the individual grass blades. What I wanted to do was be able to see where the blades going to end up in front of the lion because I wanted to cut some of the tips loose in this area. Then when I got to the hairing, I could put hair texture on the areas where the grass had been cut loose.

I've used a couple different backgound textures. A simple checkered texture between the blades of grass, and a different texture around the outside area of the picture. I am thinking this will help when it comes to the coloring portion of the picture. Now I'm ready to move on to the fun part, cutting the hair.

Mountain lion progress

I had a pretty good day yesterday with the mountain lion despite a cold that's knocking me on my butt. This piece of leather is working great and the leather putty is doing exactly what it's supposed to do so I'm getting a lot of depth and definition. It's fun when things go like they are supposed to. I was tempted to start the hairing, but I think I can do a lot more shaping with this one and I want to take my time and get as much detail into it as I can. I could have probably finished that part but I took off a few hours in the afternoon to push snow again. The wind picked up pretty good yesterday and it wont take much blowing snow to get us blocked in here again so I'm trying to get the snow pushed back off the road as far as I can. A couple more hours in the tractor today and it should be ready for the next round.

Well, here's a few pictures of what I accomplished yesterday.

Back to something I'm comfortable with

Because of Christmas, and the weather the last couple weeks, I haven't been working. Usually that means I get to spend some time carving leather. But thanks to the snow storm on Christmas eve, I got to spend the next couple days pushing snow trying to open up our road, and then several days after that repairing the loader on my tractor. Add to that playing the Maytag repairman with our dryer, and before that replacing the pressure tank in our water well. Seems like when ever I start working on any repair job it's never just something simple. I'm always missing one more bolt or tool or I didn't realize the pulley on the dryer was out along with the belt. Nothing is ever simple!!!

Today I decided to take a break and carve some leather. I still haven't finished the tiny picture Silva challenged me too but I will get back to it one of these days. I know that trying things that are "out of our comfort zone" cause us to learn and grow. But today I just wanted to do something that I was more comfortable with. I have a book of patterns from Robb Barr that I've always wanted to do something out of, so I picked 2 patterns in the book and traced them. The one I have started on first is a really neat mountain lion that Jake really liked. Since it's one of Robb's patterns, it just begs to be embossed. So far I've gotten it traced to the leather, cut, beveled, embossed and filled with putty. It's hanging up to dry overnight.

Here's a few pictures of my progress so far.