Laying Out the Body

I took a few days off from Santa to carve a few quick ornaments. I also made some adjustments to the head. I wasn't at all happy with the eyes, so I carved them off and will start again.  As long as you don't carve the original sockets too deep, you can usually make minor corrections. Anyway, on to the body. I went through some reference materials I have collected and chose a Santa with a long coat, open to see layers below. I found a nice picture with Santa wearing a vest with some interesting pattern - a painting challenge! My Santa body has already been roughed out and is about 8 1/2" tall. The photo is somewhat smaller, so I went into Photoshop and scaled it up to the right size. Next I put in some horizontal reference lines at key locations on the figure. I printed a hard copy so I could use my trusty dividers to transfer measurements onto the blank. Once I'm satisfied with those layout lines, I can head off to the roughout jig to get rid of some excess material quickly and safely. This saves a lot of the hand fatigue which I would expect if I did all this work with a bench knife.