Persian Santa

With a few exceptions, I’ve been carving my mom Santas as Christmas gifts for the past few years. You might remember Kung Fu Santa and Climbing Santa from years past. This year, inspired by a beautiful artistic camel owned by a coworker, I decided to carve a Persian Santa with an accompanying camel.

With the aid of new recently acquired carving equipment, this years work went a bit more smoothly than years past. Enjoy!

Step 1:
Find some wood and draw the front view of your santa.

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Step 2: The rough cut. I don’t have a bandsaw, which would have made this eternally easy, but I do have a chop saw which was a good start and dramatically reduced the carving time.

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Step 3:
With the front view cut, I drew a side view and trimmed whatever I could with the chop saw. Admittedly, any tool would have been better, but ya work with what ya got.

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Step 4:
With the general shape already taken care of, it’s not a lot of work to get in there to start rounding corners.

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Step 5: Having the general shape of the Santa complete, I started in on the camel. Conveniently, the shape of the camel allowed me to use a jigsaw instead of the chop saw.

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Step 6: I have a new carving tool which obliterates wood. While awesomely carvrific, it’s also brutal. I held the wood with a clamp just in case the tool took off on me. I didn’t really feel like loosing any fingers. The legs were trimmed down using this monster new tool.

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Step 7: Here’s the camel after rounding.

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Step 8: One of the best methods for detailing on wood is a burning tool. I have a burner which pumps current through a sharp tip. By digging the tip into the wood you can quickly burn away very specific patterns. Here I’ve drawn the area that I want to burn.

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Step 9: Here’s the first pass with the burning tool. You’ll note I also added some creases in the Santa’s elbow.

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Step 10: I love the look of burned wood, but if all carvings were left with the burned look, then collectively they’d look stupid. It’s always tough to start painting after the burning, but you gotta do it.

I start with a white primer coat. My camel would be blue with red and gold highlights. Check it out:

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Step 11: Paint the Santa. same theme here, white primer with gold blue and red coverings.

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Step 12: After painting, I applied an antiquing coat. It’s kinda like dirt paint. It makes things look older and accents the shadows on your piece. Here is the final result of the Santa and his camel on my mom’s fireplace mantel next to a few other Santas.

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Merry Christmas Mom!!

4 thoughts on “Persian Santa

  • 1/6/2010 at 11:45 am
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    I like the texture in his beard!

    Reply
  • 1/6/2010 at 1:36 pm
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    Love those Santas! Every year I’m surprised that you’ve found the time to carve yet another! Yay! And Ryan, the beard is actually even more textured than it appears in the photo – very beard-like. Love ’em, love ’em, love ’em! Thanks, Mike!

    Reply
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