Siberian artist makes amazing sculptures out of... wood shavings!

Culture
ANNA POPOVA
A big fluffy Pallas’s cat, arching its back, seems to be about to meow loudly - perhaps caused by a merry family of marmots next door or a golden eagle, frozen with wings spread before flight. All these amazing animals are neither from the zoo nor from the forest.

These incredibly realistic sculptures are created by labor teacher Sergei Bobkov from the village of Kozhany, Krasnoyarsk Territory. And the material he uses is ordinary wood shavings!

The Siberian artist likes to create something new with his own hands, so he has mastered many crafts. Wood carving, macramé, wicker weaving, work with a potter's wheel.

And, one day, he noticed the wood shavings - thin, as if lacy, plates turned out to be the ideal material for creating sculptures.

Before starting work, Bobkov soaks wooden bars in water for a couple of days - most often cedar, less often - beech or willow - and then begins to remove wood shavings from them.

The work is painstaking: Sergei Bobkov studies the features of anatomy, the animal’s behavior, makes a sketch and only then - a three-dimensional figure, which will be "dressed" in a fluffy coat or lush feathers.

For example, the eagle's plumage is made out of 7,000 chip plates, the sable's coat consists of 30,000 hairs, while the manul is made of more than a million details! Moreover, all elements are attached by hand!

In total, one such sculpture takes an artist several months to several years. Bobkov says he spent almost five years making the manul!

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