Nightmare King Grimm - relief carving

A relief carving of Nightmare King Grimm boss fight from the game Hollow Knight. It is done in a 16 x 8,5 inches piece of butternut wood, about 1 inch thick. The frame is made out of the same wood. Only hand tools were used during the whole process, which took something about 40 to 50 hours.

Fully finished carving - with the frame included it has 18 x 10 inches.

As with other Hollow Knight carvings I made in the past, I roughly traced the original game artwork on the sanded wood for reference. Then I used an old chip carving knife for so called stop cuts and larger gouges to remove chunks of wood.

It was not until I started tracing the image when I realized how difficult carving this would be, mostly because of its multiple dimensional depth.

I made sure to make a few pencil notes on how far to remove certain parts of the wood.

I already ruined our table once while doing a relief work on it, so I used an old towel to keep the top from scratching.

This is at about 20 hours mark. Only the very rough shapes are done at this point.

The time for larger gouges was done and only small tools were used here. Shaping Grimm was quite the task, especially because I wanted to keep the background ‘‘roots’’ as in the original artwork.

Looks almost done but still a lot to do. I decided to fully sand the piece here and continue with the details afterwards.

A big skip! I completely forgot to take any pictures while starting the background and finishing the characters details.

The first coat of Danish oil is on, the premade frames seem to fit without any issues.

A few days later I applied beeswax finish on the whole piece, the frame included.

And because I didn’t have long enough vices, I used one of the kitchen cabinets and various items found around for securing the frame for the glue to dry overnight.