"Tololochero" (Bass Player) 2016, Rafael Navarro, mahogany wood.
My most recent project consisted on building a 6' tall of a bass player on mahogany wood, it was so much work, but so fun. Like many art projects, it starts by sketching on paper a few ideas, and selecting the most appealing, then work on a model in a smaller scale, I used foam-board for this, and glue, you may see some jagged edges on my model, my blade wasn't sharp enough, anyways, it suppose to be a quick sketch, but yes use a fresh blade for better results.
From the model made, we can decide the pieces of wood we need to make the sculpture, selecting the right pieces of mahogany, in this case, I got four mahogany boards of different widths, but of same thickness, and almost 7' long. There's not only one way of making an art piece. I actually had to go to the wood supplier, and see what they have available since every board have different widths, then I modified my original model to accommodate all my wood boards.
The planing on the cuts comes next following our model. Here is where you would be glad you planned ahead, you don't want to make too much waste, wood is somewhat expensive, but even if we make a mistake, if small, we can modify a bit our original design. Something I have learn through the years is that we need to be flexible, and be open to changes, there is where your creativity
comes at play.
Before glueing our pieces together, we use clamps to hold all the parts together, and decide if we are satisfied with what we got, or if we need to make changes.
Once we are sure that we have accomplished our objective, we are ready to attach all the parts together with the help of a few clamps. Next is the finish, which is decided depending of the look you want to achieve, I used a mix of linseed oil, and mineral spirits, I added a little bit of satin polyurethane to the mix because I don't like that much an overly shiny finish. And here is the final piece. I know I skipped many details, but I wanted to keep it simple.
