In this part of the tutorial I show you how to carve the foam.

Part 1 (the beginning) of this tutorial is here

The first thing we will do when carving is establish the separation between the background and the figures. The figures are in the foreground and they have depth. We need to carve the background down around 3/4 of an inch.

I start by carving an outline around the figures. To do this you can use any variety of tools. I used a dremel with a carving bit on it.

Notice something about carving with a dremel like this. The foam now has a nice wood carved pattern. Keep this in mind if you want your bas relief to look like a wood carving.

But let me show you another technique

We want to dig that background deeper and a quick way to do it is to cut lots of lines in a cross hatch pattern with an xacto knife. Then the foam can be easily plucked out.

The background is carved away. We can now carve the figures. Do the larger parts first and save the smaller and more delicate parts for last. Here you can see the spear that the figure is carrying. That is rather thin so I will save that for last. This reduces the risk of damaging it while working on the rest of the sculpture.

Start with the larger details and move down to finer and finer details. Here you can see I am using an emery board to do some sanding and fine details.

Once all the major carving is done we can move on to the final carving detail work. And that finishes off the carving part.

Let's continue and do the painting

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