We give you Blue Ash Man.  In the spirit of Big Red Lips, we have concocted another hanging wall sculpture from small cutoffs of other projects in our shop.  This time, the frame structure has been made a bold part of the face itself.  It is ash, painted in a bright blue acrylic, and was formed from the last narrow strip of ash leftover from multiple projects—a lamp, a valet box, and so on.  The two pieces are held together by a series of 3 small ash bars hidden behind the beard, nose and hair.  The facial components are likewise various woods from multiple projects.  The eyes and beard are Hawaiian Koa.  The eyes are 2 experimental turnings on our mini lathe from small scraps left over from a chest, and the beard is Koa veneer sculptured to look like hair, also leftover from the same chest.  The eyebrows, nose and ear are all exotic Cocobolo wood left over from a suite of canary wood and Cocobolo kitchen storage items.  The handlebar mustache is a piece of African Sapele cut off from a large plant hanger.  The teeth are white oak and are the cutaways from a box made with a finger joint jig. (Yes, we save everything.  You never know....).  The hair is a piece of Osage Orange wood, and it is leftover from a prototype wall sconce.  It was shaped deliberately to form strands of hair and like the eyebrows and mustache, was also nipped along the edges with the bandsaw to further enhance the look of hair.

 

We had great fun picking through our pile of little remnants to piece together this fantastic, expressive face!  It is finished in multiple coats of brush on polyurethane semi-gloss to give him an added glow.  The piece hangs via a wire hidden behind the hair.  All you need is a nail.  

 

This piece measures 24” tall, 9” wide (at the eyebrows, the widest point) and 3” deep.