YN Reader Jeremy S. carved a Yoda and shared his story and photos with us.

I’m a chainsaw carver from Rome, GA who has been carving with a saw for two years. I will occasionally drive up to the Creative Carvers shop in Sevierville, TN and leave them a decent carving to sell. This past visit happened to coincide with the holiday, so I wanted to do something Star Wars related.

I had neither the time nor the timber to do a full size Chewbacca or a Kylo Ren, so I decided to try doing a Yoda.

That’s it. Just . . . decided to do it. I wish I could tell you a better story than that. It’s just that I knew I would only be in town for three days so I had to manage my ambitions in regards to size and level of detail. When I saw the perfect Paulownia log it was settled in my mind.

It took about 26 hours spread out over three days to carve him. The first step is to use your bigger saws to make your blocking cuts, which are the larger, simpler cuts. Then you move down in saw size to make smaller cuts until eventually you get to the dime tip carving bar, which is a much smaller saw tip that can make detailed, intricate cuts.

The next step is to use die grinders, which are like Dremels on steroids, and then a Dremel for the really fine details. After that it’s lots of sanding.

Finally I painted it with several different shades of different colors with the airbrush.