John Shortell, Carved Eagles, Wood Art

Making A Carved Eagle

The fol­low­ing is a step-by-step process used to make a recent commission.

Click on a photo to view it full sized.

I started with a solid piece of pine 48″ long, 18″ wide and 2″ thick. This is half of a 8 foot board I pur­chased. Glue ups are fine, but I pre­fer one piece blanks when I can get them.

Using a reusable tem­plate to mark board for cutting.

Sorry, I jumped a few steps. For­got to take pho­tos. I used hand held jig­saw to cut out the out­line of the eagle. Nor­mally I would use a band saw, but this eagle was too large. I then cut away wood on the wings ban­ner and tail using a large wood carv­ing gouge. Aside from the jig­saw to cut the out­line, all other work is done using hand tools. A board is screwed to the back of the carv­ing and held by vise.

I’ve removed some more wood, estab­lish­ing heights and lev­els of the var­i­ous ele­ments. Still, every­thing is very rough.

 

More refine­ment of the wings, head, shield and ban­ner. I’ve start­ing the smooth­ing process using gouges with a straighter profile.

Here you can see I’ve detailed the right talon.

Here you can see the left talon is carved. Actu­ally, I wasn’t happy with the way it came out. I ended up cut­ting it away and glu­ing another piece of wood in its place and carv­ing it again. I’ve also begun work­ing on the head details.

The head roughed out. I drilled a few holes around the beak and tongue and then used a cop­ing saw and files to fin­ish the cut out. Some fea­tures are exag­ger­ated because this par­tic­u­lar eagle will be mounted high off the ground.

With most of the sur­faces smoothed I begin to cre­ate the feathers.

Both wings are now feathered.

That’s me vein­ing the feathers.

You can see the upper feath­ers are veined. My vein­ing gouge is on the wing.

Notice the num­ber of carv­ing tools on my bench has increased dra­mat­i­cally since I started carv­ing. There are hun­dreds of dif­fer­ent shapes and sizes.

Lay­ing out the shield. Carv­ing thin lines helps when it comes time to paint. It’s eas­ier to carve a straight line than it is to paint one. For me any way.

Carv­ing is complete.

Here is a bet­ter view of the final carving.

And the fin­ished prod­uct. Fin­ished in 23K gold leaf and enamel paint. Out­side, it won’t need to be refin­ished for 50 years. Prop­erly cared for, it will be around for two hun­dred years or more.

Your email: