Carousel Horses - Coming Up - The Chicken a Menagerie Animal

Its time to get ready to paint up one of the remaining unpainted carousel "horses" that were carved by my Dad. My Dad past away at the end of October in 2015 and he left one fully armored horse about 70% finished and another horse about 90% finished (known as the patriot because of the eagle and flag design on the romance side). there are three pieces that are pretty much ready to paint at this point; a small ostrich that stands about two feet tall, a decorative figure that would have been part of the carousel itself, probably on the organ, that also stands about two feet tall and the chicken that you see here. There is also a lion that needs to have its paint redone so at some point I'll need to strip and repaint that one. The lion is just tough to work with its really big weighing in between 400 and 500 pounds. The chicken was requested specifically by my Mom. Chickens are a long standing family joke but a Rooster was requested and carved just for her.

We have sat down and sorted through rooster pictures and have decided on a color scheme so I need to buy the paints that will get us close. I'll be using alkaloid enamel paints for this one which are getting a little hard to find now but there are still a couple of local sources for it.  It still needs some sanding work and a bit of carving. Mostly to reemphasize some of the detail in the feathers which has become obscured by sanding. That kind of carving I can handle. I'm hoping to at least get the sanding done this weekend during the garage sale since we will be out there for a couple of days.

Chester the Rooster

The "Patriot" horse has been transported up to Washington and the finish work is going to be done by my Dad's carving instructor Ken Means (you can google Ken Means and find him easy enough, you can also google William Shatner with carousel horse and find Ken's work that way!). The armored horse is going to be a problem. We want to see it finished but none of the local carvers are up to the challenge. There is to much work left for Ken to be able to finish it for us so that is not an option either. My mom is currently at a carousel convention in Cleveland (an annual convention no less) and she is hoping to find someone there willing to take it on.

The armored horse in is early stages.

The head of the armored horse, those are the blanks for the legs on either side of it.

You get a better sense of the leg blanks here, in reality the legs are almost finished. These are really old pictures.

The Ostrich. My Dad was considering doing the rest of his carving at this scale and moving away from the full size carousel horses and animals.