Step 47: Cutting the feather tips thin
The process of wood burning does place stress on any area of your design. During the carving stage of this wind I left the feather tips at the overhang of the undercut fairly thick to compensate for this stress. Now that the burning is complete for those feathers I can re-cut the undercut at the feather tips to thin them dramatically.
As you look at the photos you can see the wood chips piling up. You don’t want a paper thin edge, I left about 1/16″ of wood at my tip ends. But the thinner you make these tips the more dramatic and crisp a shadow they will cast.
Step 48: Working the back wing
Work the back wing through the wood burning steps exactly as you did the front. After I under-burned the top row of feathers in this wing I had several chips that did not release so I used my rifflers to tease these chips out.
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Step 49: Burning the tail feathers, belly, shoulder, and head
The tail feathers are worked exactly as the wing feathers by first separating each feather with a shader tip edge burn line, then adding the diagonal feather lines.
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The body and shoulder feathers are small half-circle fluff feathers. I started by marking a scale pattern in both areas with my pencil. Next, I turned my temp setting down to a 4, for the Versa-Tool move back into the yellow bar area of the thermostat. I touched the tip of the shader’s edge to the center of each small half-circle then quickly lifted the tool off the wood. This leaves a very short, fine line. From that center line I radiated small lines out along the half-circle. Please see the small insert image for a detailed look.
With the wings, tail, and shoulder area complete it seemed to me that my goose was too perfect, too even in texturing. To break up that even look, using the spear shaped shader on a medium hot setting of 5.5 I laid the tool on the diagonal along the edge of a few of the feathers and let the tool tip create a wide v-burn. This breaks the repetitive look of the texture. I chose my feathers for the deep edge v-burn at random.
The neck and head of the goose is covered with fine, long, thin feathers so a fine long lines are burned using the edge of the spear shaped shader at the medium setting of 5. Those lines flow in the direction of the neck or head.