Chester the Rooster - Pt 5 - Back at it

I realized that its been a long time since I have worked on Chester, since October of 2019 as a matter of fact. The game plan at that time was to have him ready for Thanksgiving of 2019. Obviously I didn't make that goal. My mom certainly isn't getting any younger so I need to get moving on Chester. Its hard to tell how much work is actually left, I still don't have a lot of free time and this isn't something you can sit down for 15 minutes and get something accomplished.

For the most part the "money" side is finished (Chester's left side) it will need some touch up but the colors and carving are more basic on that side (its the side you don't see when you are looking at the carousel, its also the side that you typically mount from). The "romance side needs the most work. This sessions effort was focused on the wings, butt and saddles. I made pretty good progress over about a 3 hours stretch and just getting the initial saddle colors blocked in helped immensely with his appearance.

I'll try and carve out some more painting time for Chester as soon as I can.

This is where I had left off back in 2019. The saddle needs to be blocked and the wings, butt, tail and legs need the most work.

This is the section I focused on for this session

Breaking out the paints. The jars on the left hold the enamel equivalents of the primary oil paints I'm using. The oil paints in the middle and a selection of fairly good sized brushes on the right.

At the end of three hours, the saddle is all blocked in (both sides) and the wings and butt feathers have been refined quite a bit. Just getting the saddle done improved the look quite a bit. The saddle blanket will eventually be a fairly bold red (as close to USMC red as I can get) with blue striping. The leather will have a faint red tone to it when its done with black edging. I'm working on making a stencil so I can get the USMC EGA painted in the corner of the blanket (undecided on if it will go on both sides or not at this point).

Chester the Rooster - Pt 8 - And Still More Feathers

The more feathers I paint the more there seem to be. Over the course of the last couple of days I have pretty much completed the head, neck and chest feathers. I was quite pleased with myself till I looked back along the body and its seemingly endless supply of feathers.

These were the colors I was anticipating using during this round of painting. I ended up adding Prussian Blue, Cobalt Blue and Pthalo Green to the mix as well.

Here I feel like I have finished up the head and neck on the romance side. I'm contemplating bringing the yellow down farther though. Will mull that over.

Here I have worked on the wing, and the body feathers. the first layer is green and then blue under that,

A closer look. The wing feathers need some highlight yet.

In the front I brought the green a bit further down.

And the same level of progress on the money side.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 7 - More Feathers

Still working slowly on the head at this point. The money side of Chester's head is pretty much done, maybe some touch ups but that's about it. I worked on the front (below the peak) and on the romance side last night. Pretty rough at this point but it should only take another hour or so to get it to the "finished" point.

The money side

From the front, which also shows some of the difficulty created by the lighting conditions in the living room.

The romance side, roughed in.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 6 - Starting on the Feathers

Now the real hard part begins on Chester working on the feathers. I spent an hour working the colors down the feathers on the money side, which is the side you can get away with a few mistakes. The color change isn't to bad but it needs some more work before I shift over to the romance side. Still not bad work.

There should be four fairly distinct changes of colors in the feathers when its done. Looking at the "model" those changes occur in bands of color that can cut right through the middle of a feather which I find rather intriguing.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 5 - A little Red a little Yellow...

A little more work on Chester over the weekend. With the body finally blocked in I started the finish work on the head. Essentially finished all the red work and the beak. The beak probably needs a little touch up yet, but overall I'm pleased with the results thus far. At this stage I worked with a combination of tube oils and enamel paints. To make the enamels a little easier to handle I transferred them into jam jars. That essentially means that when I spill I will spill less paint at once. And yes I did manage to spare part of the jar full of Raw Sienna paint. The spill was definitely minimized by the smaller jar!

This is where I started the day. Again just blocked in colors with a bit of blending,

The reds about mid way to being finished, the blending is pretty rough at this point.

Blended reds and a yellow beak now. The beak still needs a bit of work.

Jam jars filled with enamels and tubes of oil paints

The brushes. I opted for craft brushes at this point. This type of painting is incredibly hard on brushes, especially the stippling brushes. Once you have a stippling brush broken in so its not shedding so much its just about ready to give up the ghost.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 4 - Body Base Colors Complete

Finally was able to finish off the rest of the Prussian Blue feathers on the romance side and managed to get a base coat of Raw Sienna on the legs. At this point all the body colors are blocked in (including those spots on the wings that started in Raw Sienna instead of Prussian Blue). Chester is ready to move on to shading and highlighting. At this point the oil colors will start to come into play so I need to find something to use as a palette and I will probably shift some of the enamels into small jars. I'll be using multiple colors at the same time and working on smaller areas. This is the point where Chester will become a real time sink. Right now I'm about 10 hours into the process, in some ways Chester has a lot more surface area to deal with because of the feathers than a carousel horse does and the horses took any where from 40 - 80 hours to complete. We will find out where Chester fits into the hourly wage scale now!

The light is just inadequate for good pictures and a flash blows out the colors. This is the romance side with the Prussian Blue finally finished.

This shot was a bit earlier in the day so I still have some west facing sun coming in. The legs now have a coat of Raw Sienna.

And a quick shot of the money side. The "horse" furniture won't be started on till the body is done. It will be a reddish leather saddle and belts with a red saddle blanket with the USMC EGA emblem in the back corners.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 3 - Base Colors - Prussian Blue

A little more work on Chester. Not particularly good pictures this time around, I'll try and correct that next time I have him turned around.

I'm very pleased at how well things are going, still a long way to go though. There is a lot of surface area to cover and with the detail in the feathers really makes for slow going, much slower than a horse.

The tail is painted on both sides, but the body feathers are only started on money side.

The spot of wing feathers in the Raw Sienna should be Prussian Blue as well, I'll fix that next time I have the opportunity to work on him.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 2 - Base Colors

Finding time to start work on the Carousel Rooster can be difficult. We took some extra time off this past weekend and I was able to get some of the base colors on Chester. Earlier in the week I was able to start the red and the base for the yellow. Over the weekend I worked in the base colors for the head, body and wings. Most of this work is done with a 1" house brush. I'm probably going to go through two of these before I'm done. Enamel paints are hard on brushes.

I started with the head. This is Primary Magenta and here you can see all the brushstrokes. Don't worry, I'll deal with those.

One of the benefits to working with enamels is that they dry slow, this allows me to go back over the entire area with a stippling brush and remove the brushstrokes. Tedious but that's how its done.

Same process with the beak, this time with Raw Sienna.

And after stippling

Next some work on the feathers, this is burnt sienna

Followed by raw sienna with some initial blending work as well. I made a slight mistake here the feathers in front of the saddle should be burnt sienna (as pictured) surround a grouping of blue feathers. Easy to fix, the blue is quite dark to start with.

Some of the paints, those are oil paints and will be used more for highlighting and shadowing so I haven't really touched those yet.

The main paints, quart sized cans of enamel paints stacked up in the back.
Color list at this point is: Primary Magenta, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Pthalo Green, Prussian Blue, Ivory Black, Indian Red, Naples Yellow, Primary Yellow and White. Anything else that is need will be mixed from these.

Chester the Rooster - Pt 1 - Its the small things

I pulled off the cover hoping to start the painting on Chester. I started running a tack cloth over the surface to remove any sawdust and any other debris. I was going down the back leg when I found a large nick in the wood. That has to be fixed! So out comes the filler and then it needs to be sanded and then I have decided that he needs one more coat of primer. So a slight delay before the real painting begins.

Chester will be painted in a more or less traditional carousel methods. After the last coat of primer has dried (and probably another light sanding) the body colors will be applied using alkyd enamel paints. These are oil based enamels which will dry a lot slower than the newer water based enamels although they are becoming harder to find these days. Highlights, shadows and blending will be done with artist oils. The artist oils will dry faster when combined with the alkyd enamels so it won't take months for Chester to finish drying. That will be followed up with 2-3 coats of a clear gloss.

Looks a little rough still, but another coat of primer followed by paint will hide a lot of flaws.

Carousel Rooster to the top of the que

I have shown Chester a couple of times over the years on the blog. After everything that has been going on I realized that this is probably the most important thing that I need to finish. My dad carved this one at least 10 years ago and I have had it since 2016. My mom certainly isn't getting any younger and she may soon be the only one left from her generation. While she is in excellent health I need to get this one finished for her.

It has been moved into the house (no small chore either). We have opted to do the work in the living room. Probably not the best place for a studio but it will serve the purpose. I sanded down the primer for a good painting surface and I plan on starting to get paint on him this weekend. The goal is to definitely to have him done by Thanksgiving (which is really late this year). 

We are going to go for something like this one:

This fellow was wandering around on our visit to Hawaii last year.

I'm looking forward to painting this its so very different from what I usually work on.

Chester the Rooster - WIP - Part II

A garage sale and some seriously warm Colorado weather allowed me to pull Chester out of the garage. Its been a while since he has seen the light of day but I'm ready to really get some serious work done on him.

The first task was what will hopefully be the final sanding. I got a little sloppy in places with the wood putty the last time around and that caused me to spend more time sanding than I would like. I also broke out the carving tools and carefully re-emphasized a couple areas where I had lost the detail either through priming or sanding.

The romance side, sanding complete

The money side, sanding complete

After a quick dusting off with the garage compressor I applied the third coat of primer. I stippled most of this on to try and remove the brushstrokes from the broader flat areas like the saddle and the saddle blankets. 

I was happy enough with the current progress to go ahead and order some of the paints I needed. I'll be using a technique that I haven't tried before to, hopefully, get rich bolder colors but its expensive. The primary paint will be artist tube oil colors but by themselves, and without using additives, they take a long time to dry and I want to be a bit quicker to the finish than that. Based on the recommendation of a professional carousel horse painter I'll be mixing the tube colors with enamel paints to be both thin them out and to create a faster drying and harder coat of paint. Hopefully it will work out as advertised. All in all each color will run about $40 a pop, so I didn't get everything. I'll be focusing on the head and neck first so those are the paints I'll be starting with; naples yellow, primary yellow, red magenta, ivory black and burnt sienna.

The money side primer on and drying, one last sanding light sanding session to go, nothing coarser than 400 grit

The romance side, primer on and drying. I'll let this dry for a couple of days before the sanding and painting start.

Chester the Rooster - WIP

While the gaming front didn't see much action on my vacation, the weather was warm enough to get some work done on Chester the Rooster. My Dad finished the carving on this one quite a while ago, maybe as long as five years. This one is he carved, by request, for my Mom so I really want to blow it out of the water.

The painting will be done with a combination of enamels and artist oils but before I can get to the fun part the "canvas" needs to be prepared. Early on my Dad had put some primer on Chester but didn't go any farther than that. I spend one day filling and sanding and basically ignored the primer coat that he had put down. After I was happy with that work my first coat of primer went on. This coat is used to expose any flaws in the wood work. 

I let this dry over night and rolled Chester back outdoors for another round of sanding. During this I found some places that I had missed so another round of filling commenced. The idea is to make sure that the surface is as flawless as possible. Its a bit tedious but very much worth the effort.

Here is the point where Dad stopped

I did finish sanding back in September so Chester was ready for a coat of primer

If you look carefully you can see the areas where I have had to apply wood filler to fix blemishes in the wood work.

The band of wood filler around the neck is trying to hide the joint where the head is attached to the body. You can see that in a few places around the legs too.