Wood Carving A Channel Catfish (RECAP) 

Thanks Murphish. I hope they’ll be liked enough to keep doing them.

I made them out of polymer clay. I shaped the short ones by rolling out 3 long skinny ropes that tapered on the ends and laid them out on a cookie sheet with slight curves. The longer wishers off the upper lip were made individually. I left one end fatter and pushed it onto the base of the whiskers that were carved into head and shaped and smoothed it to blend into the carving. I made several sets of each that were curved slightly different so I could choose which one I liked best. Then i baked them in the oven per directions on the clay package for temperature range and took them out a little early because they were thinner than what the directions called for on time. The clay turns into basically plastic that is actually a little flexible. But If you leave them in too long it becomes brittle and will break easily. Then I drilled holes for the short whiskers on top of the head and bottom of the chin cut the whiskers to length and used super glue to attach them. I used a little apoxie putty on bigger moth whiskers at the seams to blend them to the wood. I know some people use nails that are ground down as whiskers but I’ve used polymer clay for other projects like the deer antlers for a white tailed deer carving I did a while back and decided I’d try it for catfish whiskers. A friend of mine suggested using bamboo skewers used for cooking. Boil or steam them and they will bend to the shape you want then carve/sand them down to shape. I may experiment with that on the next catfish I do which i think is going to be a 40 inch flathead

@@Danny_Harris-Arts thank you for the explanation, I like your work thank you a lot!

Great job. Was that a gold spray at one point Danny ?

@@wappietamtam6546you’re welcome. Anytime. Thanks for watching!

@@kevinspafford1334 I sprayed a pearl white mixed with a little silver base over the gesso then the first base color after that was a yellow ochre so it looked a little gold on camera. And I used some super light coats of burnt umber followed with some metallic black followed with a dark grey almost black that also had a little burnt umber in it for the back. I think I go more into detail the the series in the painting segment.