This is the reason why I decided to make this carving; which I want to present to you through this tutorial!

Carving is a way to make sculptures specifically in wood. Carving is a delicate and dangerous process, for the simple fact that very sharp tools are used and a bad movement can end, in an unfortunate accident or the complete loss of the piece to be carved.

How to start a carving?

The first thing to do and as is usual with any project which is planned to build more replicas in the future, is the development of a template, which consists of a profile view of the figure to be manufactured, in this case our Little Golden.

The next step to proceed is to choose the wood for the carving, for the purpose of this piece and for its small size we used a wood with a thickness of 2.5 cm. With the help of the template the contour of this one would be drawn on the wood and immediately afterwards it will be held with a press.

While the wood is well secured, it is cut with a blade of the arlador type, following the silhouette of the figure made with the template.

Comparison of the piece to be carved with the template.

Once all the contour of the piece has been cut, all rough edges are sanded.

When being free of expectations it is come to mark with the pencil all the lines guides of the carving, indicating where it will be extracted surplus material.

Before beginning the carving, with a hacksaw the cuts will be executed to take out the space between the legs of the dog.

How to execute the Carving technique?

This procedure and in a piece of this size was executed with the implementation of a cutter, the technique consists of 3 simple movements: a cut in 90º followed by a cut of variant angle between 75º to 35º depending on the amount of wood to extract at that moment, the cut is made looking to make an intercession with the previous cut of 90 degrees, the last step is simply a small lever movement executed with a cutter to extract the excess wood.

The first thing to carve is the volume of the head, only the wood is extracted from the snout area, the masseters, the neck and the throat, leaving the ears intact. We also take advantage of extracting the excess material from the abdomen.

In the tail only the material is extracted from the base of this, in order to make emphasis to reflect an abundance of fur in this area.

At this point with the cutter we proceed to cut all the straight edges to give a more organic look to the carving.

With a sandpaper of No. 60 and No. 80 is finished giving a smoother appearance.

Now we proceed to mark with the pencil the features of the face and other details, and with great care of the cutter proceeds to carve gently.

Much emphasis should be placed on the details of the face, especially on the snout and tongue.

Much emphasis should be placed on the details of the face, especially on the snout and tongue.

It should be polished with sandpaper No. 180 and No. 300 and some small files. At this point our piece is ready to be painted.

The paint used was a beech color dye for wood, this is applied in most body according to the pattern of the characteristic tones of this breed of dogs, to give those light golden tones were used sandpaper between No. 60 and Nº100, eyes and lips were used black acrylic paint, red for the tongue and white for the teeth.

We already have our little golden retriver carved, and we would only need the option of applying a protective lacquer, either with ready-to-use sealer, clear varnish or polyurethane, or it could simply be left with the finish of the paint as It was decided on this occasion.

Thank you very much for reading my post

All images, banners, stripes and gifs used in this publication are my property.
See you in a future publication

___ Inu-Jim ___