My first attempt

This was my first attempt at carving one of my cartoons into wood. If you read the previous blog you will remember that the wood I carved with back then was balsa. The one similarity I now relate to my time carving with balsa was at times with a sharp X-acto blade you could still get burrs on attempting detailed cuts. You get the same in bass wood with a dull knife. With either situation you can scrap some of the fuzziness away but you never get a truly clean cut which shows on the surface of the carvings. 

On a side note but related to the previous paragraph, I have ordered a Smith's TRI-6 Arkansas TRI-HONE Sharpening Stones System that should be here sometime today. I don’t have a lot of fancy tools nor do I have an elaborate sharpening system. My hope is that I can master the art of knife sharpening and that I will see a difference in my carving with properly sharpened tools. A lot of what I will need to learn will be patients. I like to take on a task, get it done and move on. So I have taken a lot of short cuts (no pun intended) in my carvings. I will elaborate more on that later.

So here is the character in cartoon and also how it turned out free hand carving in balsa. I say free hand carved because I didn’t think to draw a pattern on the wood. I didn’t know about the rough cut concept, after all this was in the 80’s. There was no internet back then. I just glanced at the picture and started carving. The results are obvious, but still this is one of my cherished carvings, it is the first time for me to ever carve one of my cartoons. This is the purpose of this blog and my focus for my carvings. Turning cartoons into carvings.  That’s my story an I’m stickin to it.