Taotie

Don’t know what it is?  Join the club.  I hadn’t heard of it either until Harold contacted me and asked if I’d carve one up for him.  Best thing is, he was able to send me a drawing right off the bat.

Wow.  So this is basically a mythic Chinese creature.  I’d seen the image before, but never knew what it was called.  How could I NOT take this project?  What a cool idea.  Plus, it’s yet another break from skull rings (my bread and butter, mind you).  It’s a beast of a project though and I’ve had to do some fairly extensive planning.

Step 1 was to make a depth pass of this ring to show which planes would be at the surface and which would be recessed.  And here it is:

This example shows a pass for depth and also a scaled down version.  We’re going to have to ditch a lot of detail to get this to work, but the basic lines have to be the same.  This isn’t the kind of design you can just marker onto a ring, so I started with the wax right away.

And then put the first pass of depth into it.

So much more work to do!  This isn’t the kind of project I can just plow through either.

See, I’m the kind of guy who really sucks when I lose interest in a project, so I can only work on something while I’m “in the zone.”  There are guys out there who can just power through something and I’m here to tell ya, that isn’t me.

Basically what that means is I can only work on it for a few hours at a time before I need to work on something else….get a fresh perspective.  Then, I can revisit the piece with virgin eyes.  Generally, I just perform better that way.

This project though…it’s gonna rock.  I can tell.  Things like the caveman….that could have gone either way.  THIS one though, it’s gonna be a hit.