Lion Whittling Tutorial | How to Capture Likeness in Small-Scale Whittling

This video is a tutorial to making this lion's face but more importantly this is an exercise in capturing the likeness of animals in small scale whittling and in this case we're working on a lion. If you haven't seen the part one where I talk about how to make reference sketches for something like this, I highly suggest checking that out and then coming back to this. Because even though the sketches I made can be found in the description, trying to make the sketches yourself can be a very helpful exercise in getting a better idea of the different proportions of a lion. Okay so next I'm gonna put this front profile on this piece of wood. I'm just making a rough, a very rough version of it. It's going to be slightly smaller than on paper. All right that has pretty much the same proportions so now I can remove a little bit of this excess wood and then I can make a very very rough side profile but I have to be looking at these things so the tip of the nose, the furthest away part is gonna be somewhere there and it's gonna go like that. There's the underside of the chin then we have the mane over here. Yep something like that. We're going to continue by removing these two areas and you could do this with a saw but I'm just going to do it with my roughing knife. Okay that's good enough there's no reason to carve this side profile to be perfect because the face is not going to be this wide. We're just going to waste time by doing this. What I think is better is to recreate that rough sketch and based on this we can still look where the different angles and everything should be. That's pretty much it and now we can remove all of this up until here so I'll make something similar on the other side too something just like that and then here's a bunch of wood that we can take away. Okay the entire face is also going to be much wider than the area where the nose and the mouth are going to be so we can again make a very basic sketch like that and then remove some more wood. This part of the project can be a little bit frustrating but it's going to be a lot easier if you just focus on the basic shape in this case it's just this outline shape and then the fact that the face should get slimmer towards the tip of the snout. Something that you really need to focus on is keeping the eyes and along them the widest part of the face in the right place because it can easily happen that this shape doesn't hold up and you just end up with something for the further steps are going to be much harder so for that it makes sense to draw this line every now and then and see if everything still fits nicely and if it doesn't then it's still pretty easy to move this corner higher or lower. Then we're going to start making some sweeping cuts over here and on the other side in order to make this area a little bit thinner and to reveal the distinction between the snout and the rest of the face. So there's quite a few layers to this simplification process so in a very similar way to what we did on the paper we're going to do stuff with the wood over here we're going to go from basic shapes to more defined shapes and we're going to try to do that in a priority order so now that I have these over here I'm trying to distinguish this part so that the proportions of the muzzle and the forehead are going to be decent. Now over here on the sketch the forehead goes a little bit inside the the mane I don't think that's necessarily a good thing it's going to make it a bit harder to make so I'm going to change this just slightly like this this is going to be more like the wind is blowing the mane a bit further back it's going much easier to make when we don't have to make inside curves if we don't absolutely need them so now this connects to this line which is the same as over here and it's going to be nicer to carve. Now I'm going to try to make this angle right so it should be more like that now it's pretty round just creating a flat surface. Okay now it's starting to look pretty decent in my case now I can see that the head has moved slightly lower and I have too much mane over here I'm going to take it down a little bit. Okay now by looking at this sketch and by looking at the actual image the eyes and everything around them should be more horizontally aligned and now all of this is kind of downturned which means I should take a little bit away from here like that also this angle is too aggressive that's pretty good and there's also some unnecessary sharp edges taking them down and creating a smoother shape can really help with understanding the proportions a little bit better so that's what I'm doing now. Now we're getting to the finer details so we should be able to create a clearer edge over here and a better inside curve over here on both sides and now that I look at this photo the forehead of the lion is actually quite flat so over here there shouldn't be a sharp edge between the front and the side of the forehead it should all be quite smooth now over here there can be a little bit of an inside curve over here because when we look at this photo the brow is slightly more distinguished and then we can also create just a little bit of an inside curve over here on both sides now I think comparing to this sketch the forehead and the muzzle are pretty much the same length but it's not like that in my sketch or in this photo however in this photo they seem to be pretty much the same this is the trouble with looking at online images there are two different lions they might look slightly different but also different angles might make it look like the proportions are I'm just gonna continue with this where the both of these areas are pretty much the same I'm gonna adjust this sketch just slightly like that to make it more in line with these proportions and I'm gonna continue with this especially when carving animals you're almost very likely that you'll run into this issue unless you're carving your own pet or some famous animal where there's many pictures of that specific animal online because different individuals often look different and that means that while using multiple reference images is useful and oftentimes necessary sometimes you're gonna have to pick one image that's like the main reference and make the proportions and positioning based on that and then use the other images just as supplementary references for some of those angles that you just can't know based on that main image I'm gonna make sure that it's decently symmetrical over here there's a little bit of a mass difference it doesn't matter if the main is asymmetrical I actually want to make it slightly asymmetrical because it's gonna look more lively but the face itself should be pretty symmetrical so I'm gonna try to fix that and then we'll move on all right that's good enough for now we're gonna move on to some of the finer details and we're gonna start with this slight inside curve on the forehead just in the middle I'm gonna make a few very very tight sweeping cuts this is gonna separate the brows from each other we can continue these lines into a bit of a y shape that's good enough for now then I'm gonna make a basic shape for the mouth it's the same inverted v-shape I'm also gonna sketch the nose at this point so that I know that everything is proportionate looks pretty similar it's good I'm gonna also check the side view try to figure out where this should go somewhere over there and then I'm gonna carve this mouth with a few stop cuts like that pressing the blade directly into the wood not too deep just a little bit and then I'm removing wood from the chin so that then the upper lip is hanging over the chin just a little bit like this and I'm continuing this to the sides like that and like that that's it the nose is gonna be basically the same thing except we do that with very very small v-cuts like that and like that and then this line is gonna be made the same way now from this we can create a little more defined nose shape by marking the middle parts over here on the side of the nose and we can make a couple very very small sweeping cuts with the tip of the blade now the grain direction doesn't really agree with this but it can be done so something like that and it makes it look a lot more like the nose of a lion instead of basically a lot of different mammals like we did the exact same thing on this sheep the proportion shot just slightly different so now adding this nostril it's gonna make it look more like a lion and then the same on the other side of the nose like that then we can move on to the eyes and this basic shape over here it's gonna be much easier to follow than looking at the photos so we're just recreating the details of the reference sketch onto the wood and now this is gonna work pretty similarly to these parts so i'm gonna start from here pressing the blade into the wood just a little bit then i'm gonna do the same thing over here and then i'm removing the piece of wood by cutting from down here and then remaking these cuts so that they're deep enough like that it's pretty nice and then i'm gonna be making that same thing on the other side like that i'm gonna carve these lines too they're gonna be a lot more shallow it's just barely a v cut almost nothing more than scratching the wood a little bit with the blade over here closer to the eye can be slightly deeper like that now if you notice that there are some areas that need refining after all these details now is the time to do so and then we're gonna focus on the mane and the ears i'm making these very very small sweeping cuts over here on the brows to highlight these two lines over here here i'm just separating this part of the face and this a little more clearly just a little note not everything needs to be fixed like over here the face goes a lot deeper on this side than over here but since i'm gonna make the mane turn that way a little bit as if wind was blowing it to that direction that means the main is kind of pushing in from this side and that means that this corner can be a little tighter than this one over here next are the ears i'm checking from up here that they're pretty much the same distance away from the tip of the nose and then i'm just gonna make some v cuts i'm gonna make those v cuts turn a little bit like this to reveal the higher parts of the ears something like that is good and then i'm moving on to the other side again checking the right positioning from the top and then creating that curved v cut on the top of the ear then we're going to carve the front of the ears and for that first on this side so i'm creating this this kind of shape that kind of shows the ear from behind the main but not entirely so it's a v shape with a curve just making two stop cuts to reveal a little bit of that ear from behind the main like that and then with a few sweeping cuts i'm gonna make that ear a lot more three-dimensional i'm gonna push that inside of the ear a little bit further to create that hollow shape like that and then i'm making the edge of the ear a bit rounder like that and then i can clean up this shape of the back side of the ear to be rounder and nicer yep we don't really need to show any more than that of the ear i think it looks cooler if the main is a little bit fuller and covering the ears and it's also easier to make on the other side i'm going to make the ear even less visible not quite as invisible as in this photo but but something close to that so i'm removing a little bit of wood from here so that the tip of the ear is at the same distance from the face compared to this side so i'm basically doing the same thing except now making a smaller cut like that but from here i want to define the height of the ear to be leveled with this one like that and then i can reveal a little bit of it by making a v-cut at first and then making the back of the v-cut flat with these stop cuts even though this isn't showing that much i'm gonna try to carve the inside of the ear just a little bit to make it look more hollow like that and then from back here behind the first hairs of the main over here we can still define the shape of the ear with a few v-cuts like that and then create that point where it starts to curve inward back towards the face this bottom part of the ear is going to be defined with these two v-cuts this way the ear kind of disappears into the main nice and smooth but it still leaves this divide like in this picture we can see that it's hard to clearly distinguish where the ear ends but it still creates this clear distinction in the main something like that and a similar thing can be done on this side too next we're going to work on the main and that can be a little bit tricky since we're working with a hard material and trying to make something that looks like fluffy hair but one thing that i think helps is if we try to keep this pretty rough and not make too much of a smooth surface like this so we can just try to make some very ugly cuts a lot of small kind of ripping cuts in order to take down this sharp edge so we want this to be full of cracks and tiny little details but then over here in the areas where the main is already pretty thin close to the ears we don't want to chip the ears either we're going to need to make these tiny cuts in a little bit of a more careful manner starting to look better already so i'm basically just making like a sweeping cut motion i'm just doing it very aggressively so that the cut is very tight almost just like a scratch i'm also just slicing the wood a little bit creating a lot of tiny scratches to get that hair like finish so making the main is basically just a combination of making a few bigger shapes like that and then working around those big shapes with tiny scratches you can make some v-cuts too and remember these can be the ugliest possible cuts they don't need to be clean because we're going to make the surface very rough anyways and again i'm making these cuts a little bit that way as if the wind is blowing the hair over there remember to also make some bigger cuts because if you just make small scratches the shape of the main is going to be too uniform whereas it should be a little bit messier with some thicker parts of hair and cracks in between and this is an important part about creating that likeness that essence of a lion i don't need to try to copy the main exactly as it is in this photo instead i can look at it see where some of the hair usually parts and how it flows and in what position it is compared to the face and then i can make it look cooler i can make it flow nicely like i'm doing over here so that it's moving in the wind and i can arrange my own composition this part should also be pretty round in terms of the general shape which means that if there's still a sharp angle you can take pretty big cuts like this that's it for this one let me know in the comments if you want to see more of these kinds of very detailed projects or if more simplified projects are something that you prefer