I had bought the chunk of wood about 10 years ago when I saw it at a Michael's craft store. It had the knot hole in it and I knew right away that I wanted to do a Woody Woodpecker maquette for it but I just never got around to it until I started teaching the sculpting course at Humber College.
For their first sculpting assignment I have the students design their own characters but then for the second assignment, they have to choose an established character, which is quite a bit harder because if you goof up anything and it doesn't look like the character design, it's really bad. With your own designs, you can blame artistic licence for any modifications and it's still o.k. because no one would know except you.
If you make the proportions wrong or change a design element on an established character, then basically it's "off model" and you can really tell.
I think this one turned out pretty good.