I will show you how to make a cute wooden dog :)

Supplies

Material

Wood. I used a 2 cm × 16 cm × 10 cm piece of beech wood, but any wood is fine. If you do not have many woodworking tools at your disposal, you should use softer wood, for example fir.

Tools

* Pencil
Glue
* Saw
* Sandpaper (60 grit, 120-180 grit for finish)
Belt sander
Drill + wood drill bits (I used a 6 mm one)
Rasps and/or files
Vice

* The project can be completed with only pencil, saw, and sandpaper. With these an appropriate wood should be used.

Step 1: Concept

Draw a dog on a paper or on a piece of wood directly. If you draw it on paper, you need to glue it to the wood.

I prepared the design which you can download and print. If you are going to use drill to roughly shape the dog, my drawing has additional lines to guide you. (So you do not drill or saw too close to the main piece)

dog.pdf
Download

Step 2: Transfer the Outline on the Wood

Draw or glue the dog on the wood. I used wood glue and waited over the night to dry. Make sure that the wood grain goes vertically, otherwise the legs and tail will not be sturdy.

If you will use the glue, make sure you spread the glue as evenly as possible.

Step 3: Rough Outline

I found that drilling is the easiest way to cut through hard wood. Of course you can use saw or any other tool to cut the piece to its rough dimensions.

With a sharp object mark where the center of the drill should go. A nail will do the trick. Put another piece of wood between the table and the dog, so you will not damage the table. Carefully drill around the dog. Pay attention so you do not drill too close to the main outline. Also, if you drill too close to another hole, the drill may slip to the other hole and extracting the piece will be harder.

Once you come around the piece, take a saw and separate the it from the wood. When I saw this roughly shaped dog, I decided to name it Spike :)

Step 4: Fine Outline

With a rasp, file, or sandpaper carefully approach the main line. At this step the shape should be good but does not need to be perfect. In next steps we will eliminate the mistakes we made until this point.

Step 5: Legs

Drill a hole where the legs will be separated. And try not to lauhg doing so :)

With a saw cut between its legs towards the hole. Then sand the inside with a sandpaper until it looks nice.

Step 6: Tail, Head, and Ears

I used a beltgrinder to thin the tail down, because it removes a lot of material quickly. In the picture, where the paper is still there, we can see the area I sanded. I also sanded around the neck so the ears pop out. I thinned down the nose area which completed the ears. To fully form the head, I narrowed it towards the nose.

Step 7: Final Sanding

Now the game of patience begins. Sand down all of the edges. At first I used quite a rough sandpaper (60 grit) around the body of a dog. There was the most of the material that had to be removed.

Then I used a finer sandpaper (100 grit) to refine the shape even further. At this stage I sanded the whole dog, not just the body.

I rounded the legs with a thin strip of sanding paper. I put it around a leg and sanded with movement that you see it when they polish shoes in movies.

Finally, with the finest sandpaper I had (180 grit), I removed all scratch marks I made using rougher sandpapers. The more time you take for this step, the nicer the final product will be.