
This one made itself over the course of two years. First, I carved a life-size mask in fir of a Nara period face drawing. Here it was:

click on photo to enlarge details
Then what? I used it in the Head Case. Here’s what that looked like:

Then I let it sit for a year while I worked on other things.
When painting wood sculpture during this period, I cleaned brushes, rags, knives on the inside of a utility closet door. If I were a formal painter I would call this panel my wood palette for the time. Here’s a picture of that:

Meanwhile I took another cut at the Nara fugitive, so then it looked something like this.

And then I took many looks at the two pictures (and countless derivatives) in Photoshop — the result is the image at the top of this post.
The biggest image my printer can make is 13″ wide and maybe as much as 28″ long. Any bigger, means I have to take it out to a real printer.
By Peter Neibert, Kentfield, California, 2014