The Owl's Beak and Final Touches

One little job which remained was to shape and fit a beak on the Owl.

I decided to use a darker wood to give a little contrast to the otherwise somewhat smooth and undecorated Owl.

A piece of rather hard dark red wood, possibly a variety of Mahogany, was found and the beak shaped on the end.

A tenon was shaped and then the small piece cut off.

A suitable 'slot' (mortice) was cut into the front of the Owl's face and the Beak fitted quite tightly. A small dab of wood glue holds it firm.

The Owl being finished, the only remaining task was to fix the Parrott's wings.

Wood glue liberally applied to the inserts and these then pushed into the slots in the body made a tight fit which should last.

So now we have a couple of shots of the completed pole.




















Now all that remains is to give the whole piece another coat of sealant after rubbing carefully with grade 0000 wire wool to get rid of the 'nibbies'!

Approx 1 hour per coat of sealant and 1 hour to shape and fix the beak.

Main Carving Finished

The Parrot is now virtually finished, all carving on the body and wings being completed.

The wood of the wings was not quite as dense as that of the main pole, so tended to flake a bit. As the wings are feathered this doesn't really detract from the effect.

Parrots have strong claws on Totem Poles so I followed suit. The rather oddly shaped legs seems also to be traditional as I mentioned earlier.

The wings were attached to the body by leaving about a centimeter of squared off wood at the end and then cutting a mortise into the body so that this fitted tightly. Once this was completed the carving on the wing was worked on so that the join was as natural as possible.

The beak was undercut significantly as in the Stanley Park example.














The Owl needs a beak, but that's the main carving finished ... It remains to clean up a few of the surfaces with abrasives where he grain has caused difficulties with the gouges, and then sealing the surface.

Appox 12.5 hours
The main carving has therefore taken a bit over 90 hours, with about 6 hours in the setup, working with the school and researching.

Parrot's Wings

Having nearly finished the Parrot, I decided to work on the wings. I found a suitable piece of Idigbo, which more or less matches the main pole. However it is somewhat drier, less dense and flakier. As it happens this is not a major problem as it gives the feathered area a somewhat 'ruffled' feel.

I scaled the wing design from the Stanley Park Pole seen in a previous blog. Conveniently it fitted onto one page of A4. I traced the outline onto the board and cut around it with a band saw. I then reversed the cut out piece, drew around it on the remaining piece of board and cut out the other wing.

With work like this, which will have exposed edges, I find it best to work from the centre outwards. So the centre curved line is witnessed first and the scalloped cuts of the upper feathers cut in to it, gradually deepening. Only when the upper surface of these feathers are as I want them do I cut their edges and then start surfacing the lower feathers, gradually approaching the bottom edges.

Having done both rows of feathers, I shaped the upper wing design which has the 'eye' in the centre.



On this photo you can see one wing completed and the other after about 1.5 hours work.
The upper feathers completed and the second row in progress.

As can be seen on the completed wing I have 'feathered' the whole wing by cutting back the underside to give it a certain delicacy and lightness. This was mainly done withe wing face down on an anti-slip cloth.

Approx 7.5 Hours

The Parrot

One of the problems I've had with the parrot is getting a design that was right for this Totem. For a start there are not many North American tribes that have Parrots on their Totem poles. I guess because Parrots are not common in the northern parts of North America. However I found some, including the Hopi.
I intended at first to base my figure on a true parrot, but any examples I found looked very different from the real thing. So, because of the very iconic nature of the Totem Pole I decided to base the design on the icons I could find on actual totems.
The principal model was in Stanley Park, Vancouver.

The strange thing about these bird images is that they usually have legs and thighs more like a ground animal rather than a bird, and I decided to go with this feel.

The basic shape and proportions were roughly cut out, and at this stage I did decide to keep the proportions rather rounder than in my principal model.

The Christmas and New Year got in the way a bit but I've now had enough time to rough out the basic shape and define the legs and face etc.

The top of the head has been particularly difficult to smooth because of the cross-grain cutting of a rather hard tough grained wood.

The eyes and feet will now be defined the eyes etc.

I will be adding 'add-on' wings later.





Approx 12.5 Hours