It's a Wizard, Harry

My daughter asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I told her I wanted some books that might help me learn to draw some aspect of human anatomy. I figure to better carve, I need to better understand and drawing might help with that. Also I want to be able to design my own characters and not be confined to copy work from patterns, not that there's anything wrong with doing that. I think I also mentioned that, at some point, I'd like to try some fantasy characters - gargoyles, wizards, dragons ... that sort of thing. So she got me a great book by artist Chris Hart called "Drawing Wizards, Witches and Warlocks". The book suits my purpose perfectly.
I like that the characters are dynamic - not just posing, hands at sides - another issue I want to tackle.


The book has been laying on my desk for a month now and yesterday, I took it out and started browsing through it for ideas. Yesterday, I was in a local bookstore browsing the woodworking books and I found Tom Wolfe's book "Carving Wizards". On sale! I took that as a sign. My next area of endeavor shall be a wizard. I want to use this as a project you can follow along with on this post and not just a before and after photo. I have a few interesting ideas for bring this character to life as a unique piece and using a couple different techniques for developing a form and creating a front/side pattern to work from. This should be interesting.