Some time ago I made a sperm whale from wood. It´s no cephalopod of course, but perhaps one of the animals with the biggest ecological impact on many cephalopods, and surely the most iconic nemesis of Architeuthis. So I thought you could like it.
The whale was cut from a board, and it took a lot of time to to carve, rasp and sand it, to give it a more rounded and more plastic shape. I wanted to make it somewhat similar to old carved depictions of whales from the 19th century, a bit similar to those found in whaling ports like New Bedford.
I used oil colours to paint it (in fact this was the very first time I´ve worked with oil colours). The overall shape of the whale is somewhat stylized, but I tried to make it still as close to reality as possible, to include all the more or less typical traits of sperm whales. I added a lot of scars, including scars from the teeth of other bulls around the nose, sucker scars from giant squids around the mouth, cookiecutter-shark scars all around, scars from orcas or sharks at the end of the fluke (which date from a quite young age) and a lot of random scars. Some sperm whales have a white belly patch, often coupled with a more blurred whitish area on the flanks. I included this lesser common traits to show a bit more colour contrasts on the body.
The whale was cut from a board, and it took a lot of time to to carve, rasp and sand it, to give it a more rounded and more plastic shape. I wanted to make it somewhat similar to old carved depictions of whales from the 19th century, a bit similar to those found in whaling ports like New Bedford.
I used oil colours to paint it (in fact this was the very first time I´ve worked with oil colours). The overall shape of the whale is somewhat stylized, but I tried to make it still as close to reality as possible, to include all the more or less typical traits of sperm whales. I added a lot of scars, including scars from the teeth of other bulls around the nose, sucker scars from giant squids around the mouth, cookiecutter-shark scars all around, scars from orcas or sharks at the end of the fluke (which date from a quite young age) and a lot of random scars. Some sperm whales have a white belly patch, often coupled with a more blurred whitish area on the flanks. I included this lesser common traits to show a bit more colour contrasts on the body.