Advice on Intarsia sculpting

[newholland]

I am in the process of my 1st natarsia (duck). having done half of it, it looks ok. The only inconsistant look is the sanded bevel (rounding) one puts on the edge. Any advice of how to do it and what size to do. I have a drill press with those soft sanding sponge,belt sander. hand sander. Please let me know. Also how do you sand the little parts.

I moved your thread to a more appropriate forum to maximize traffic and get you more responses to your request/question. I also edited your title.

[Spirithorse]

I think my best advice to you would be to check out the local library for any of
the Judy Gale Roberts books which have instructions.
Other than that, it is all pretty much a personal preference on what you think
looks well.
On my intarsia pieces, I would hazard a guess that I only round over the interior
edges that abut one another by about 1/8" to 3/16" and it looks deeper than that
because they are joined against each other.
The outside edge, I probably round over anywhere from 1/4" to 3/8" on 3/4" stock.
I use a 6" belt sander, 1" belt sander, drum sander with various sized drums, a palm
sander, and LOTS of hand sanding. Generally speaking, each grit gets increasingly
finer in the order of each tool above. A Mop sander would eliminate some of the
hand sanding and I am definitley going to be buying or making one soon.
God Bless! [email protected]

[dedijerry]

If you could post a pic it would help. You might check out intarsia.net there is a great tutorial on intarsia. Best help would be to look at the many items in the Intarsia gallery and study how others have shaped similar projects. I do that a-lot. Good luck!

[jim_mex]

Hi - first of all, congratulations on giving intarsia a go.

I second the previous comments made. A good tutorial will give you the basic ideas for shaping. After that its down to personal preference in developing your own style.

Check out some of the intarsia challenges in the 'sticky' thread at the top of the listings in this forum subsection. They give lots of advice plus you can see how different scrollers approach a similar design.

Most important of all is to follow Jerry's request and post pictures of your work so that members can see exactly the article and where you may need help. Don't feel concerned or self conscious if you estimate your work is not good enough to post. There are no prima donnas on this forum and everybody will appreciate that you are a newcomer looking for advice and folks will readily chip in to help you.

Cheers!