wax carving tutorial 5

At this stage I am starting to round off the heart and the handle of the dagger, as you can see I am cutting angles into the parts that I am rounding off. This is a critical process in sculpting subtractively, in the photo I am using a needle file to cut a 45 degree angle into the handle of the dagger. Think of it like this, the handle of the dagger up until this point was squared off with 4 sides. If I cut down all of the corners equally I now have an 8 sided octagonal shape, if I knock those 8 corners down equally the thing will be damn near round. That's the basic Geometric principle. It is a lot more accurate than just arbitrarily hacking away at the piece until it looks round. You can also see that I have shaped the wings a bit and very roughly added some segments to them, these lines will be the points where the different layers of feathers will overlap each other. At this point everything is still very rough and slightly larger than it needs to be, I don't start adding any kind of fine details until all of the rough shaping is done and all of the elements are where they need to be.