Cardinal

[David_Aaron_Sercel]

Here is a carving of a Northern Cardinal that I finished this afternoon. The bird was carved from tupeo wood and painted with acrylics and the pine branch base was cunstructed with brass.

[bcarvings]

Hi,
That carving is really good. You must be an expert. I wish I could do that... Was that carved with powertools? Also how did you do the shading on the back of the cardinal? Thank you

[David_Aaron_Sercel]

Yes, it was carved with power tools. I use a heavy duty flex-shaft tool for roughing out and a Ram Power 45 micro motor for the detailing.

The shading on the back: I blocked in the colors with an air brush, using four shades of red – a light, orangish red for the highlights, two medium tone reds, and a dark purplish red for the shadows. Then, I went back in with a brush and highlighted the feather tips with a light red, doing each barb individually to give it a feathery look. After that I used a darker red to ‘highlight’ some of the shadows, this time painting in between the highlighted barbs to give it more depth. Then I went through and added shadows where it looked like there should be some, like where a feather overlaps, using a dark, reddish black.

Nice, David, really, really nice.

David all of your birds are so life like, beautiful!

As usual David, beautiful work. You have a delicate touch, an eye for detail, great composition and your colours are splendid.

Well done.

Bob

I swear, Dave, I thought I saw your cardinal fluff his feathers this morning in the cold pre-dawn air! Great work.

Al

[Callynne]

David, he's terrific! I can't imagine how good you will be by the time you're my age...a master carver, for sure! Great work! Callynne

What a wonderful bird.I envy you your skill and patience.

David, Like all the others above have said, your bird carvings are fantastic.

For others new to seeing Davids work, I suggest you check out his web page, he has a great step by step section on carving one of his birds. I really enjoyed it, along with his gallery of pics.

Base.....very unique and just perfect, well balanced layout.

Coffeeman