SOUTH PORTLAND — Josh Landry knelt before the 12-foot-tall maple stump, tracing his chainsaw along a black line penned on exposed wood. The machine hummed in fits and starts as he cut through the wood like butter.

Sawdust flew in all directions. It obscured the logo on his baseball cap and nestled into his thick, rusty beard. It dusted his fleece and neon orange work pants and clung to his face.

He brushed specks of wood from the carved kitten playing with a butterfly at the base of the tree. Other woodland creatures in various stages of detail occupied different levels of the stump. A squirrel hung upside down, frozen while clawing at suet. Two birds faced each other. After they’re completely carved, Landry will lightly air-brush the creatures, adding pops of color.

Landry has been wielding chainsaws since he was 16 years old, inspired by a local wood carver from his hometown of North Anson.

A few years ago, he transformed a dead ash tree in Stephen King’s front yard into a bookshelf with critters huddled in the shelves and carved birds perched in the sculpted branches. People came and watched as he carved. “I tried to not let the pressure get to me,” he said.

King posted about the finished product on his social media, and Landry’s business took off.

Now, Landry travels across the state and country eight months a year to create custom, hyper-realistic sculptures out of tree stumps. The cost ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on the level of detail, the species of wood, the size of the tree and how much negative space is requested.

His wife, his high school sweetheart, and their 7-year-old son accompany him to all of his jobs.

“We went all in,” Landry said. “It’s always an adventure.”

He parked his camper in Connie Cardamone’s backyard in South Portland for a week and a half for his most recent on-site job this season. This year, he’s carved 10 tree stumps. He’ll complete custom orders — including furniture, small-scale sculptures and garden pieces — from his home in North Anson as he hunkers down for winter.

When a branch from the maple tree fell in a storm and got caught on Cardamone’s gutter, “it was a message that I needed to do something,” she said. Cardamone had other threatening trees in her yard removed, but she didn’t want to take the maple all the way to the ground.

“I Googled ‘chainsaw carvers in Maine,’” she said. Landry’s was the first website that popped up.

When Landry arrived at Cardamone’s property on Oct. 15, he started by setting up his metal staging and stripping the bark from the tree, revealing the yellowish raw wood. It usually takes him two weeks to make his tree-stump sculptures, and he said that the first couple of days are pretty slow.

“I just sit and stare at the tree and really just visualize how everything is going to be,” he said.

He does not like to draw before showing up for a job. Instead, the designs come to him through dialogue with the client.

“It’s a really personal thing,” he said. “I put them into the sculpture.”

For this project, for example, Cardamone said she wanted the piece to be inspired by her love of birds. A crow wasn’t in the original plan, but when one perched on the staging area while Landry was carving, it made its way into the sculpture. Same with a raccoon with a mischievous expression eyeing the carved birdfeeder.

“He showed up in the yard,” Cardamone said. She plans to attach birdfeeders to the finished sculpture.

By the fifth day of the process, Landry said he really gets flowing.

“I’m not thinking because I already processed it all in my head laying down at night,” he said.

Landry likes to make bold cuts, taking pieces off in one swoop that may take others 10 cuts. “I see that it needs to be gone and I get rid of it,” he said. But he also pays attention to detail, like when he adds beady eyes to animals to make them come to life.

And his tools have become an extension of him. He owns 40 chainsaws, and he swears he’s not on any sort of watchlist because of it. For a typical job, he brings 10 to 12 saws, but he regularly reaches for the same seven.

He maintains a healthy respect for the saws, always watching the tip and minding the kickback. Several years ago, he had a wake-up call. While his wife was pregnant, he fell off a staging area on Valentine’s Day. An 80-pound piece of wood fell 14 feet and landed on his head, making his crown look like a watermelon.

“It was a good lesson in safety and slowing down,” he said.

He said he’s blessed that his family travels with him. He regularly asks his wife’s opinion on his carving.

“She uses one side of the brain,” he said. “I use the other. Together we make one brain.”

And he said his son isn’t too impressed by his work. It’s just what Dad does.

“It must be a pretty cool piece to get him to smile,” Landry said.

Landry took a break from working the other afternoon, pausing on Cardamone’s back deck overlooking the wooded yard. The dying sunlight turned the oranges and reds into gold. A downy woodpecker flitted around the stump before tentatively perching on the staging equipment. Landry whipped out his phone and took photos.

“This is too perfect,” he said, a grin spreading across his sawdust-covered face.

The bird hopped onto the naked wood, inches from its roughly carved wooden counterpart. It pecked at the fresh wood, doing its own type of carving.