Cindy Chinn, an artist from Chester, Nebraska, carved a whole scene into a single carpenter's pencil: three elephants, an adult, a calf and another adult, walking past flat-topped trees across a strip of grassland. The treetops are carved from the pencil's wooden casing, the tree trunks and the elephants from its graphite core. The adult elephants are only a few millimetres tall.
The piece, which she calls the Elephant Walk, was commissioned for display in what she calls the Epiphany Elephant Museum. The client asked for one elephant. Chinn has said she got carried away and, after studying reference photos of herds on the Serengeti, decided a family on the move would be far more interesting. She stopped counting the hours, though by her account the work took several days.
Chinn first gained wide attention in December 2015, when a tiny train she carved from pencil graphite, running on graphite rails into a tunnel cut in the wood, was shared by art sites around the world. The elephants pushed her further: she moved from a magnifying lamp to a trinocular microscope to carve skin wrinkles and the calf's fragile trunk. The photos below follow the finished piece, her process and some of her other miniatures.
The finished Elephant Walk
The full scene from the side. Two acacia-like trees with rounded wooden canopies stand on the left, and the three elephants walk in single file to the right. The graphite tree trunks are thinner than a pin, which makes them some of the most fragile parts of the carving.
A slightly closer view shows how the pencil's natural layers become the landscape: pale wood for the canopy, darker stained wood for the ground. Small shrubs carved beneath the trees fill out the savanna setting.
The elephants up close. Each one has visible ears, tusks, a trunk and leg joints, and the calf walks between the two adults as a young elephant would in a real herd. Graphite's dark metallic sheen makes them look almost like cast metal.
Seen at an angle with the sharpened tip of the pencil in the foreground, the herd seems to walk toward the camera. The ground was scored with fine lines to suggest grass, an effect that is easiest to see from this low viewpoint.
How the piece is displayed
The finished pencil rests inside a glass tube on a wooden stand with a built-in round magnifier, so viewers can see detail that the naked eye would miss. On her blog Chinn says she built a custom case for this commission, and the pencil itself was sanded, stained in two tones and foil-stamped with a logo before she started carving.
From carpenter's pencil to elephant, step by step
The elephants and trees were not all cut from one piece of lead. Chinn carved them from several pencils and then mounted them on the final one. Here, rough sections lie on a ruler marked in centimetres and inches, giving a sense of how small the working pieces are.
She starts with a carpenter's pencil, whose flat shape stops it from rolling and whose thick rectangular core gives more graphite to work with. A rough grid scratched into the graphite helps her keep the proportions right as she scales a reference photo down to a few millimetres.
The basic body shape is roughed out under a magnifying lamp. At this stage the elephant is still joined to the block of graphite, with legs and trunk only suggested.
Commercial tools are not always fine enough for work at this scale, so Chinn makes some of her own. Here a partly carved elephant is held between finger and thumb, showing just how small the figure is next to a human hand.
The final stage adds texture: wrinkles on the legs, folds of skin on the body and the curve of the ear. This kind of detail is what required the microscope, since a single slip could snap a leg or the tip of the trunk.
The workstation
Chinn's bench combines a large magnifying lamp on a rolling stand with a trinocular stereo microscope on an arm. A stereo microscope gives a three-dimensional view and leaves enough space under the lens to hold and carve the piece, which is why it is popular with miniature artists, watchmakers and jewellers.
Other miniatures by Cindy Chinn
A graphite baseball mitt
A tiny glove carved on the tip of a yellow pencil, shown in its glass dome and from three angles. The open glove even appears to hold a ball in its pocket.
A close-up beside a ruler shows that the whole mitt is only a few millimetres high. Every finger of the glove is separated, despite the brittleness of graphite.
Inside Art
For this piece Chinn carved a small head into the point of a yellow pencil, displayed under glass with a magnifying lens on a chain. The four views show the face from different sides.
A closer view of the same head, with a further small detail carved on top. The title plays on the idea of art hidden inside an ordinary pencil.
The Beast
Here the wood of a vintage advertising pencil marked "COOP Fertilizer" has been split open to reveal what appears to be a creature carved into the graphite inside, as if it were bursting out. The set also shows the piece in a glass tube on a stand.
A Day at the Beach
A plain natural-wood pencil carries a tiny beach scene on its point: a white parasol over a small deck chair, shown in its display dome and from several sides.
A second version adds colour with a bright yellow parasol. The parasol's canopy and pole are carved so thinly that the light shows through the edges.
Why pencil carving is so difficult
Pencil "lead" contains no lead at all. It is graphite powder mixed with clay, and the name survives from a time when graphite was mistaken for a lead ore. That mix is soft enough to cut but brittle enough to shatter, so carvers have to take off tiny amounts at a time and avoid pressure on thin parts. Chinn has described holding her breath while carving the calf's trunk.
Magnification makes the work possible, but it also exaggerates every tremor of the hand, which is why carvers rest their wrists, work in short sessions and often make their own blades and points. If you want to try it, start with a thick carpenter's pencil, a sharp craft knife and simple shapes such as letters or a chain before moving on to animals.
You can see more of Chinn's work on her website, on Facebook and in her Etsy shop.
Sources: artwork and photos by Cindy Chinn; first shared on Bored Panda; train carving details from Colossal and My Modern Met; graphite facts from Wikipedia: Pencil.
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