MilkmanVIII

Daniel | he/him | 25 | 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Currently deep into Star Wars, particularly the High Republic, but I also like Marvel comics, and plants. And I also make stuff which is sometimes related to those things

[milkmanviii]

TIE fighter made with brown ivory, African Blackwood, walnut and a tiny bit of maple.

Since I made an X-wing, I needed to give it a TIE fighter to shoot down. I wanted the overall colour to be a little darker than the X-wing so I went with the brown ivory as the main lighter colour and I think it worked out pretty nicely.

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Comic book display frames made with various species of scrap wood. I always like using scraps like this, both because it looks cool and because it makes me feel better about eternally hoarding increasingly smaller pieces of wood. I could list all the species in there but there are so many and I would probably miss some.

I initially made three of these but then realised I probably had more than three comics I could frame. Luckily, I also had more wall. I wanted to make sure I could switch the comics out easily too to ease my general indecision on what to put in there, so they’ve each got an opening at the top so I can slot them in in the bags.

[milkmanviii]

Wooden X-wing made with maple, Osage orange, redheart, African Blackwood, and a little purple heart for R2-D2.

I decided to hang this one from the ceiling instead of making a stand, both because it looks cool and it saves shelf space.

This one took a long time cause there’s so many tiny pieces and small glue joints which kept breaking with too much pressure, especially in the laser cannons. Just gotta hope it doesn’t fall down

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Elzar Mann’s lightsaber made with lacewood, Mexican rosewood, and African rosewood, with a cherry stand.

Finally completed the firebrands’ lightsabers! Good reference images for Elzar’s hilt were really hard to find but I got the high republic lightsaber book recently so now I have reference for everything.

I thought the Mexican rosewood would be darker before I cut into it but it turned out to have a really dramatic grain pattern, which is really nice, just not what I was expecting. It’s also quite hard so you can get a really smooth finish.

[milkmanviii]

Been painting some 3d printed plant pots. Might’ve had to print the helmet twice because the first time I hairdryered it too hard and the plastic warped but hey it’s fine

[milkmanviii]

Obi Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber from A New Hope, made with maple, mopane, lacewood, African Blackwood, and redheart on a walnut stand.

This one was fun but Blackwood sure is hard to carve. I also did a bit of pyrography on this one, which did warp the lid of the slidy box but it sort of unwarped as it cooled after I stuck it in the vice so it does work.

[milkmanviii]

A box based on The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dali made with maple, cherry, elm, osage orange, african blackwood and various stained poplar(?) veneers.

This took a long time and is also huge, much bigger than I’m used to working. I have damaged myself in many ways making this but hey it’s pretty. I also broke a few of my own rules using stained wood and a little bit of wire for the ants legs but I think I chose the right colours to make it look as natural as possible.

[milkmanviii]

Vildar Mac’s lightsaber made with maple and Osage orange with a cherry stand.

This was lying around half made for months cause I couldn’t find the right wood for the top part. I started making it impulsively after High Republic #6 came out and just had a weird maple spindle hanging around for a while. I also found that Osage orange is in fact a very hard wood and very hard to carve, I was scooping at that thing for actual days. I should really get a power carver of some form. But it’s a really nice wood and I will do a lot for a good bit of ✨chatoyancy✨

I also got the high republic lightsaber book recently so I now have so much detailed concept art I couldn’t find before. I could finally complete the firebrands set!

[milkmanviii]

The X-Men’s Blackbird from X-men ‘97, made with walnut, cherry, African blackwood and redheart, with a spalted beech and leadwood base.

This one’s definitely more sturdy than my Jedi vector, except the base, the front wheels are definitely a bit tentative. I found a bunch of reference images all of which were either slightly or significantly different from each other so this is kind of an amalgamation of the ones that kind of agreed with each other but mostly just the stuff I liked from each one. I can never quite get picture that I like that show off the colours of everything correctly, it’s either really desaturated or really oversaturated or everything’s too yellow so I’m still trying to figure out the best set up.

[milkmanviii]

The Rod of Daybreak and the Rod of Seasons, made with tanga tanga, cherry, cedar, and red mallee burl with an ash base.

I got a chunk of red mallee burl for Christmas and I was really hesitant to use it cause it was too nice, but I finally bit the bullet for this, and I think it worked out pretty well. I wanted something a bit different to go in place of the crystal parts (echo stones?). It was a pain to carve though because the grain goes in all directions at the same time so it’s really hard to get a clean cut.

It was also a challenge to get the two rods to fit together. I haven’t done much of it before so I went very slowly and it’s a pretty decent fit.

[milkmanviii]

Cohmac Vitus’s lightsaber made with spalted beech, padauk, and panga panga, with an oak stand.

This one was fun, with a bunch of carving and a slightly dodgy drill press clamping system which may have exploded a little the bit the piece itself was fine so all is good. I like the bright red/orange of the padauk and I think it works quite nicely as an accent colour against the other woods. I also used panga panga in Reath’s saber and I thought it was nice to have some continuity between master and padawan.

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Porter Engle’s lightsaber, made with cherry, mopane, spalted lime, and redheart on a beech(?) stand.

This one was a lot of carving and not that much turning. It’s also one with a lot of art and comic book depictions, but with comic book lightsaber depictions, the exact shape isn’t generally consistent so it took me a while to figure out what I wanted to do with the curved guard part. This was a fun one though.

Manifesting alive Porter for Temptation of the Force. He’s not dead you can’t convince me.

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Orla Jareni’s lightsaber, made with maple, leopard wood, and Indian rosewood, with a spalted (beech?) stand.

Besides the hinge part, this one was pretty simple to put together, though the hinge was quite simple once I figured it out. I decided to put magnets in the bottom so it would lock itself in the long, staff form. The magnets I had aren’t very strong but it’s just about enough to hold it.

I finished it with citrus oil instead of lemon oil this time. Partially because there’s no small, fragile parts that might break off if I buff it with the wheel, but also because it has a stronger smell, as Indian rosewood has a very, distinct smell kind of like old piss which was not being covered up with lemon oil. Even the citrus oil only covered it up for about a day. It does give a shinier finish than usual though.

Orla was always a really interesting character with how she doubted the ways of the Jedi but still staying firmly in the light

[milkmanviii]

Some fore edge paintings of the phase 3 books. I wasn’t quite sure on the design for these but I think I kind of got what I was going for. I didn’t have too much of an issue with the paint cracking either, or at least not too much of an issue I couldn’t fix later. The pages curled up quite a bit on Escape from Valo so I’ve had it in the clamp for a few days, hopefully the pages have flattened out a bit.

These books keep getting gayer and gayer and I’m very much here for it. Escape from Valo was so fun, all of the younglings were adorable and I would die for them

[milkmanviii]

Wooden Jedi vector, made with cedar, panga panga, redheart, and lacewood, with a cherry stand.

This was quite awkward to figure out because there isn’t one specific way a vector should look. All the official art is very slightly different so I had to figure out the right shapes and proportions for everything so it still looked enough like a vector. It’s not massively symmetrical but the Art of the High Republic book mentions that ship models for Star Wars actually have built in asymmetry to make it look more lifelike, so yeah that’s all definitely intentional I did that on purpose, definitely…

The joints on this could definitely be stronger, it’s literally just held together with glue, but as long as you don’t swoosh it too hard it does hold itself together.

[milkmanviii]

New lightsaber just dropped, and this one stabbed me personally multiple times. Those spikes are, in fact, spiky.

Ty Yorrick’s lightsaber, made with leadwood, mango, sycamore, and a tiny piece of redheart, with a beech(?) stand.

The mango looks really nice but the piece was full of fine cracks which did make it difficult to work with, especially the spike pieces which kept breaking. The sanding on the spikes probably could’ve been a little neater but if you don’t look too closely you can’t really tell.

Ty’s such a cool character, I hope we get more of her in phase 3

[milkmanviii]

Made my sister a tool box for Christmas from waste wood and plywood. I could list all the woods I used but that would probably take a while.

This is definitely much bigger than the small boxes I’ve made before, I actually got to use the router to put in the base. I veneered the bottom and the inner sides of the lid to hide the edges of the plywood, in a sort of patchwork pattern to match the rest of the box. I also put a small veneer edge on the top of the lid which is definitely just for effect and not because it didn’t fit together properly.