For many wood carvings, especially figurative ones, I first work out a pose using a DAZ draw program, then sort through my wood supply searching for something that might contain the shape I want to make. “Gone” was made by a completely different process. I first selected a walnut billet that was cut at a fork, with clear wood on one side of the fork and a hollow on the other side of the fork. This billet had interest on its own at the outset and merely needed an added shape to go with the hollow.
Early on, I could see that one side of the fork had enough clear wood for something pretty big, and what could be a more obvious choice for something holding on to a tree hollow than a woodpecker? I knew just where to look for a beak — the pine thicket.
A few years ago, a buck died in our pine thicket. I don’t know whether it was hit by a vehicle or shot and I did not make a forensic examination of it to find out. Vultures and coyotes quickly disposed of most of it, except for a few bones. I selected one of these deer bones, a vertebrae, for the woodpecker’s beak.
The vertebrae I chose was similar to the one pictured above except the spine was more pointed. I made a crosscut of the spine, slightly beyond the hollow for the spinal cord. Before attaching it to the wood, I drilled a three fourth inch hole in the head up to near the estimated tip of the crest, inserted a dowel pin, drilled a small hole in the dowel pin to insert a nail connecting the bone to the wood. Ebony filings mixed with glue filled in the rough spots of my connection. I needed that dowel pin running through the head because once shaped, the tip of the bird’s crest would be cross-grained and vulnerable to splitting off from the head.
In order to carve the rest of the shape, I first mounted the billet on two holding blocks to allow me to put it in a vise and orient it any way necessary to work on it.
Preferring natural wood, I didn’t make any pretense of matching color to any bird. Pileated Woodpecker was my reference for its shape, but the light color of the bone bill made me think of Ivory-billed Woodpecker. Ivory-billed Woodpeckers had an even thicker bill than the one in my carving. Native Americans made things from its bill, but it was us European immigrants who caused it to be gone.