The Staring Stone

Hello! Today I want to explain in brief how I created a crocodile-dragon looking eye out of stone. Carving some sort of eye has been on my list for ever, but I never started this project because it seemed a bit intimidating. Then gators came to my mind, because they already have a stone-like skin. I thought it would be interesting to realize so I just went for it.

The whole stone took about 10 to 15 hours of work time.

• stone
• rotary carving tool
• a few diamond bits for carving
• clear glass nugget
• watercolours
• pencils
• a lot of patience and good music

The first thing I do when I want to carve something is looking for references on google that I like. Sometimes I only take the pictures as an inspiration, but this time I found one that kind of captivated me, so I wanted to roughly recreate it. I don't think I am allowed to post the original picture on here since it's not mine, but the drawing is really close to it.

In this step I only worked with the diamond disc visible in one of the pics. With a light stroke I sketched the design onto the stone. To create an edge, I cut a bevel from the lower side, using roughly the angle in the picture. It is important to work slow and with medium pressure. The bits can get dull if they heat up too much, to prevent that from happening you could use a little bit of water as cooling.

This is the main step in the project and it took sooo long to finish, but isn't that hard to explain. Basically, with the disc, I roughly carved away as much material as I could, keeping the carving symmetrical by turning the stone to all possible angles like the ones in the pictures. At one point, I couldn't use this technique any longer because the discs diameter would have cut a hole too big for the glas. I then used the big spherical bit to even the lower surface. Moreover, I made an edge on the inside using a big cylindrical bit. To get the glass nugget to fit properly, I laid it on the stone and marked the areas where it could rest on the edge.

After the nugget fit, it sticked out because it was too thick. I flattened the back of it with the disc bit and later sanded it with sandpaper up to 1200 grit to make it clear again.

The bottom lid is supposed to be lower than the top lid, I used a small cylindrical bit to form some kind of indentation. I also added another crease at the front and defined all edges with the conical bit. After I was happy with the main shape, I used the small cylindrical bit to add creases and wrinkles all over the skin. To get a rougher texture I used the same bit and went with medium pressure over the whole stone in a random pattern, like you can see in one of the pics. For the iris I just scribbled with many different tones of green over the same place and drew the black part on. After that I glued the paper on the back of the glass nugget. The glass part snapped into place when I testfitted it without glue so I just left it there. I wasn't quite satisfied with the tone range on the stone, so I painted black watercolour in the creases, let it set a bit, watered the edges and dabbed away some of it. I also highlighted the areas in between the wrinkles with acrylic paint thinned with water for more contrast.

Thank you for reading!