3 months-ish ago I did a face of a gorilla on a piece of wood. This I wanted to cut out so that I ended up with a gorilla head.
Since I have no coping saw and I didn't want to use a jigsaw, that meant I had to learn how to use a fretsaw.
Imagine the pieces of tape being removed, revealing a nice shade of red. Looks incredible.
Sawing the outline went without a hitch, I didn't even break a sawblade.
Since then I have done 4 other projects that took a bit more skill.
Enter a vid on youbtube of a guy turning a comic book cover of the Hulk into a piece of art by using a coping saw and several
types of wood of different colors. Absolutely amazing.
I wanted to do something like that using the fretsaw. Found a pic of the Hulk
and went "No way you can do that, it's much too intricate!"
I tried it anyway. The physical size limit that you can do with a fretsaw is a bit under A4 size, so I printed the pic at that size, cut a piece of 4mm plywood
to size. This I covered with painter's tape, spray-glued it and put the pic on.
I sawed out the outline, cut another piece of wood to size, painted the top side black and glued the outline piece of ply on.
Then I began sawing out a lot of small parts. Very tricky to do since that ply is very brittle if cut to a width of say 3-4 mm.
I broke a few pieces, sometimes even when sanding the edges really lightly.
After having sawn out all the parts, I used the off-cuts as spacers and glued the Hulk together.
The pics don't do it justice, the contrast between the ply and the black paint is much greater IRL. It's also a lot more "3D" IRL.
This took me about 15 to 20 hours.
The original is on the right, the left one obviously is an internet copy.