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 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.

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.