Chung Lee – Parts 1, 2, and 3

Part 1: This post will cover the carving of the head. You’ll note that I have not included his mustache, his beard or his Que. We’ll add them in the next post. The reason I’m doing it this way is that they will be somewhat fragile and if we carved them from the original block the risk of their breaking is not worth agravation so we’ll just add them on. They will be much stronger that way.

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The next post will be fun as we’ll have to figure out how to do the mustache, beard and que inserts to where they don’t look attached. I’m up for the challenge how about you?

Part 2: Today we attach the mustache, the beard and the Que. We’re going to be working with small, thin pieces of wood so they’ll be fragile but not as fragile as they would have been if we had did the head as a one piece carving. Just take your time and you shouldn’t have any problems.
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To glue the pieces on I’ll use dark wood glue instead the normal carpenters glue. It’s basically the same stuff but the dark glue will help us when we carve off the excess that is squeezed out when we make the attachments. The mustache will be first then the beard and last the Que. But first let’s make a neck collar to dress the piece up a bit. It’s that little square with a hole in it.

With this post we’ll apply some paint. In the Gallery section I explain how I go about it so I won’t repeat the process here. I Finally finished the smaller painting details on the hat and neck collar. I went to the web and found some chinese symbols for various things like peace, knowledge, etc., so I painted them around the base of the had and collar. Makes it look a lot colorful.