Lyra and Bonbon in the Park-Woodwork

Happy Valentines Day, everyone!

I stayed up half the night just to be sure I finished this Lyra and Bonbon set by today. It's a holiday for love and Lyra and Bonbon are such a cute couple.
Plus this set is for in thanks for his donations to the Smile! Charity event, and Valentines Day is a good day for remembering that love comes in many forms. Sometimes it's romantic, sometimes it's friendship, and sometimes it's giving to people we don't know in order to make the world a better place. So, thanks for all you've done, mate!

Well, this set was a ton of fun, quite a challenge, and definitely a learning experience. Certainly, learning to carve a ponies face from the full-face direction rather than the profile direction was a challenge, and Bonbon's face still isn't very good. I'm also pretty fed up with ash at this point. I think I'll be switching to a new go-to carving wood after this. The grain is just huge and lumpy and I've been unable to do good detail work on it.
Bonbon was definitely the tougher of the two. I've been trying to make my ponies more accurate, less blocky, with limbs as separate entities from their bodies, and this particular foray came back less than great. I'm not exactly an art student, so the subtle play of neck muscles in a twisting head are simply lost on me. So Bonbon has a bit of a "wildly misshapen torso with crazy legs tack on" look to her. Lyra on the other hand, is the other way round; she's rather...I dunno all fused together. She looks like she's made up of one piece, rather than limbs and a head attached to a torso.

Even so. Even. So. This was a lot of fun. I've been working my way up to a slouching Lyra almost since the start, and it's good to at least see how I'm doing. The answer: I'm not there yet. I'm a long way from a lovely, sculpted, slouching Lyra. But I can carve a sloppy, sculpted, slouching Lyra, and I couldn't a year ago. Maybe in another year I'll have what I'm looking for.

Inexplicably feel like seeing about two dozen more photos of these two? Check out their album over at My Little Woodcraft!

Lyra, Bonbon and My Little Pony belong to Hasbro.