The Making of the Jim Morrison Portrait!

This was the first "person" I have even ever tried, another first!!!! I made it for my daughter Amanda for christmas, turned out better than I thought, maybe a start of another adventure in scrolling... Enjoy the pics, click on the thumbnails to get a larger picture!

The first thing that needed to be done, as with almost all the wood projects, is to develop the pattern on the computer, print them out, glue them to the wood to be cut out, and cut the wood into a workable piece. I used a 1/4" Baltic Birch plywood for this.

The next step in Scrolling is to prep the piece to be sawed! Since Fretwork is defined as "intricate inside cuts on a solid piece of material", you have to cut the inside, without any intrusion from the outside of the piece. I use my Dremmel and a 1/64" drill bit to drill pilot holes for the saw blades. You want the smallest pilot hole possible as to not drill into the finished part of the wood. This one has 22 inside cuts, might not sound like a lot but when you are cutting it, it seems like millions!!!

After the prepping comes the fun part, cutting........ Well at least I think it is fun, lol. This is the most time consuming because after you feed the blade through the pilot hole, attach it to the top stay, make sure the tension is correct, saw out the section, loosen the tension, take the blade out of the top blade stay, put the blade in the next pilot hole, then repeat! Then of course, if the blade breaks, you have to do everything over again. The one things I HATE about the inside cuts is when you break a blade 1/4" away from finishing a cut!

Of course, last but not least, is the finishing of the piece. After sanding and prepping, I used "Golden Oak" stain on it and backed it with a piece of dark blue velveteen. Can't wait to try other portraits after this! I hope you enjoyed the pics, more to come for other projects...