Chewbacca, Daniel D. Brown, 2022
Chewbacca! What a wookie!
Ever since I made “Punch it!” a few years ago (piece showing Han and Chewy on the falcon with programmed lighting and sound), I knew that I wanted to make a more complete “solo” Chewy some day. I decided to go with sequel trilogy Chewy since the previous piece was from the original trilogy. His “aged” fur is also a bit more dynamic, which I figured would play well with multiple woods.
I designed this piece by combining a couple different photos of @joonassuotamo posing as Chewy on magazine covers. The design alone took quite a few hours. However, when I started this project I did NOT know it was gonna take me a full 14 weeks – and I’m glad I didn’t, as I almost certainly would have said “e chu ta that!”
This work came out to 653 individual pieces of wood, all cut by hand on a scrollsaw. I have to give a huge shoutout to all my @saburrtooth rotary bits – I could not have shaped and sanded all these pieces without them. All the wood is natural color, except for the irises of his eyes, which were stained blue. 16 species of wood were used (below), some of which were interesting reclamations, such as the 1970s era African stinkwood chair I’ve mentioned in several projects (it’s an endangered tree and no longer available). A lot of the wood was scavenged and milled by me from firewood and storm-felled trees.
All in all, I’m incredibly pleased with how it turned out. It was impossible to tell beforehand if the color/wood choices were going to actually look alright in the end – there were just too many pieces to fully visualize it. It isn’t perfect, but I think it does the job!
Not for sale and I don’t take commissions!
Woods: catalpa, walnut, elm, mahogany, stinkwood, wenge, holly, ebony, limba, bloodwood, purpleheart, yellowheart, chakte viga, maple, rosewood, leopardwood
