Wiz Part 1 - Character Development

For my wizard carving, I decided to use as my inspiration a wizard from the "Drawing Wizards, Witches and Warlocks" book  shown at the right.
As it turns out, Tom Wolfe's book concentrates on just one wizard, so I might use it for some help carving the head and face, but otherwise that book won't help much on this project.


To make a front/side patterns, I dusted off our wooden anatomical model. It took a bit of "playing" with the doll to get is posed the way I want. The I took front/left/right photos and brought those into Photoshop. I want to make sure the scale is the same for all three shots. If I decide to size them down or up, I can apply the same proportion to all three. For Photoshop uses, I'll do this in one file on three layers and using opacity setting, make sure all three angle are the same size. To make sure this will work, make sure the photo resolution is the same for the three photos I took and the new file I will bring them into. I'll use 150 dpi. Next, I label the layers "front", "left" and "right". I decided to make the figure about 9.5" high. You can see in the photo on the left (front, left and right views) he is leaning back a little (about 8 degrees).

All I need from this is a good outline of the figure. I will be adding clothes and other physical details drawn by hand, drawn on a printed copies of each pose.

My next step is to get some tracing paper and start on some sketches of the robe. This is going to have a very large, thin collar. I'll have to work out how to do that. I think I might make the head and arms separate pieces, glued up after most of the carving is done. He'll also be holding some kind of wizardly staff in his left hand and I think I'm going to make his beard much longer than the one in the sketch.