Practice stick woodspirit

[Irish]

Here's where I am tonight ... off to do a little more.

Susan

[Bill Anderson]

Irish this is a great tip. thanks

[Irish]

After working with Snidly for a while last night I decided I needed more mustache to balance out the extra large nose.

You can see there are a few thin gaps between the new mustache addition and the original mustache. That happened because I had already done some carving on this area so I did not have two perfectly falt planes for glueing.

If I don't lose those gaps during carving I can easily fill them in during the painting stages. When I mix my primer or base coat color I will take a little of that mix and add either corn starch or flour. This makes a nice paste that can be pushed into those gaps as filler with a palette knife of tooth pick.

Small gaps like these usually take just one filling. Larger ones may take two or three because the paint mix shinks a little as it dries. Because acrylic paints are a form of plastic the corn starch or flour becomes permanently sealed.

For this type of project I prefer the corn starch filler over wood filler ... wood filler seems to me to be too hard and dense in comparison to basswood for my getting good results.

Susan

Looking at the photos I think I have a nice deep mouth area that could easily take a long stemed pipe ...

[Irish]

Roughing out of the twining branch, hair and stick center is done.

Susan