When we last saw Cindy Chinn, she carved a train into a pencil that went completely viral all over the interwebs (see HERE).

Here latest and most elaborate creation is the Elephant Walk, commissioned by the Epiphany Elephant Museum. According to Cindy, the design started out simple, an Elephant with a foil stamped logo. Then she got carried away… after looking at a reference she decided she needed to carve a family of elephants walking across the Serengeti, because carving just one elephant wasn’t challenging enough! A few days of carving later and here you have it!

She carved the train using a 5x diopter magnifying lamp, a 10x diopter floor lamp, and a 90x Trinocular on an arm, which is basically a microscope that can be setup for a long field of working distance. Cindy said that without these, she would never have been able to get the detail in the elephant’s skin or the baby’s trunk, which was REALLY crazy hard to carve without breaking…

Using the wood of a pencil, Cindy carved the tree tops, and the trunks are made from the graphite lead

She scored the wood of the pencil to create the look of grass

She carved the elephants from different pencils

She started with a carpenter pencil, adding rough grid lines for reference

She carves the basic shape out using my magnifying lamp

Sometimes she also makes some of her own tools because she can’t always find points that are small enough

She completes the elephant with skin texture

Her work station is complete with a magnifying lamp and a trinocular

She also carves other tiny things, like this graphite mitt

Inside art

The beast

A day at the beach

And don’t forget, if you’re looking for a piece of original art to hang on your walls, check out artFido HERE!