Wood Carving for Beginners: Bird of Paradise- Kitchen Cutting Board

A cutting board is the first thing most people carve that somebody else actually picks up. It sits on a kitchen counter. Your family sees it every day, and one day one of them keeps it.

The board here is basswood, about 10 inches by 13, and a full two inches thick. Yours does not have to be that heavy. 20mm is plenty, though a thicker board stays flatter over the years and warps less.

What is curly wood carving

Curly carving is an ancient European style built almost entirely out of curls, and different nations gave it different names that all translate to the same word. Carvings like it survive from the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries all across Europe.

I carved a piece in this exact style about 20 years ago, a shallow dish, and it still looks right. The style has not moved in a thousand years because it does not need to.

Almost all of it comes off one knife. A gouge joins in on this project, the first time it appears in the beginner path, but 99 percent of the work is still the knife.

What wood do you use for a carved cutting board

Basswood. Europe sells the same tree as limewood or linden, and it is the wood the old masters carved. Riemenschneider worked limewood in Germany in the Middle Ages, and his pieces still carry their color.

Thickness matters more than people expect. My block is two inches, which is more than anybody needs, and it will never move. A thinner board carves the same but is likelier to cup on you after a season in a kitchen.

What tools do you need for this project

One number 12 chip carving knife and one gouge. Any knife of that shape works.

Everything you learned about the three angles carries into this board. Straight down at 90 degrees, angled from the right, angled from the left. The bird gets outlined with the upright one.

Hold the handle tight and keep your supporting hand out of the blade's path. I have carved myself before, so I say it every time. Sharpening is the thing that comes after the knife, and it takes years. Better still, turn the board instead of reaching around it. Rotating gives a cleaner line than stretching does, and you can see the waviness in mine where I did not bother.

Why one knife, when there is a wall of gouges behind me

Somebody wrote and asked me exactly that. Why teach a one knife technique when people already own other tools?

Every tool has to be handled properly, and you learn that one tool at a time. A carver in ancient times had a knife or a straight chisel and nothing else, and what they left behind is not simple work.

Learn the knife and every other tool turns into a toy. I am not being poetic. I still reach for a knife constantly when I carve flowers and fruit, forty years in, and my own teacher started me on nothing else.

A number 1 carpenter chisel will do most of what you see on this board, working off one corner of the edge. Try it if you have one in a drawer. The first cuts course is where the three knife angles come from.

Where do the border lines go on a carved board

Three lines, drawn in from the edge. About a quarter inch, another quarter inch, then one eighth of an inch. The third one earns its keep later, when the border pattern needs something to stop against.

A ruler is fine. I use a scale. But 2,000 years ago nobody had one, so here is the other way: lay your middle finger flat against the side of the board, rest the pencil on the wood, and run your hand down the edge. Your finger is the fence. The line comes out straight enough, and your hand learns something a ruler never teaches it.

Do you have to be able to draw to carve a design

No. I design these straight onto the wood with a pencil and an eraser, changing my mind on camera. You watch the whole thing happen, including the parts I do not like and rub out.

Start with the main movement, not the details. One long line that says where the body of the bird goes. Then the tail. Wings after that, and the eye last of all. When the bird reads as a bird, fill the space around it with curls, a few leaves, a flower where a hole opens up.

Everything has to flow. No T stops, nothing that runs into a wall and quits. Ancient carvers stylized every living thing they drew, so follow that same habit and let the shapes curl rather than copy a photograph.

I'm not sure if you're able to catch that on the camera or not, all those moves, but once it's done, it's going to look really, really nice.

I photograph the finished drawing and post it, and the free resources shelf has more to draw from, so you can scale it up or down to whatever board you have. Take the idea of filling the space rather than the exact bird.

Why does everything have to flow into one line

Every line on the board has to arrive at the same line. I call it flow, and I mean the word plainly. A curl finishes, a new line starts where it finished, and that line runs back into the main one.

Get it right and the eye travels the whole board without stopping anywhere. When it is wrong you see that instantly, even if you cannot say what is wrong.

What goes wrong has a shape and I call it a bubble. One line bulges out past the flow, sits there on its own and refuses to belong to anything. It happens when you draft fast, which I do.

The fix is an eraser. Rub the bubble out, draw the line again so it repeats the curve outside it, then carve it. A whole course sits on this, and design is the half almost nobody teaches.

What is the first pass on a carved design

Straight down at 90 degrees, following the outline of the body, going slowly and never forcing the blade. A slight angle will not ruin it, but the upright pass looks better.

Depth is your choice. Deeper reads stronger from across a room. Start the pass wherever the wood lets your hand sit comfortably, even if that is not where the shape starts.

Then rotate. Rotate again. On a curl you will turn that board a dozen times, and each turn buys you a line you would not have got by twisting your wrist.

Where does the curl shape come from

People call it a volute now. The older name, and I mean much older, is Solomon's cucumber. One look tells you why the name stuck.

That element was already old when the temple in Jerusalem went up. Greek carvers knew the word volute. A carver in Germany or Scandinavia in the 9th century did not, and called it what it looked like, which was a curl.

How do you carve the curls without breaking them

Cut the first line straight down, then add a second line beside it about 3/32 of an inch away, angled in to meet it. Only one side is beveled, so it is not a true V groove, and it looks cleaner that way.

Between two details, start the pass with a slight bevel to match the one next door, then finish it upright. Ease off at the very end. The wood between two passes is thin and it snaps if you lean on it, which I have done and which you will do once.

Keep going back with the cleaning pass until every chip flies out on its own. A chip you have to pick out means the two passes never met.

Why stay a sixteenth of an inch deep

Real furniture gives you no more than that. A Chippendale door panel, or a French or Belgian one, often stands only a quarter inch proud, sometimes 3/16, and the carving still has to look three dimensional inside that.

So the small details on this bird go no deeper than a sixteenth of an inch, and the wings no more than an eighth. Some places less. It still reads as carved from across a room, and that is the exercise.

Cut the corner out first. Cut that little triangle down to the depth you want, and now you have a floor to blend everything else toward, instead of guessing as you travel.

The stain helps too. It settles deeper in the low areas and darkens them, so a sixteenth behaves like more than a sixteenth. The furniture panel course is where this training gets spent.

Why do the ridges come back a day later

You pressed the fibers down with the blade, and a day later they stood back up. Wood is a sponge, only harder, and a fiber crushed under the blade opens again in a day or two.

So the pass that looked perfect on Tuesday shows ridges on Thursday. You did nothing wrong. Take the knife back over it.

There is a second reason to wait and it has nothing to do with wood. Your eye adjusts. Live with a cracked mirror in your house for a week and you stop seeing the crack, and exactly that happens to a carving sitting in front of you every day.

Leave it three or four days. Carve something else. Come back and every spot you missed is waiting there, and you find them far quicker than you otherwise would. Questions like this one are what the techniques Q and A exists for.

If you look at your work, let's say, and you think it's done and you like it, you are not an artist anymore.

My teacher said that to me once and I have never got away from it.

How did carvers sand wood before sandpaper

Dutch reed does it, a plant that grows by rivers and swamps and is abrasive enough to take wood off. Nothing like 180 grit. Much finer than that, and slower.

Cut a section about an inch and three quarters long, or use the whole tube for tight spots. It works either way, and it gets into a corner no sanding block will reach.

Grinling Gibbons finished his work this way. The man who restored those carvings in England found the same marks on them, left by the same plant I am holding.

Why not sand a carving

Sanding presses the fibers together, and then the finish stands them back up. Put a water based finish over a sanded surface and the grain rises, so you sand it again, and again after that.

On a flat panel that is a nuisance. A shape like this one makes it close to impossible, because you cannot work an abrasive into the places that need it without rounding off everything you just carved.

A knife pass leaves the grain where it lies. Almost nothing rises later.

Then there is the look of it. Tool facets across a surface say a hand did this and not a machine, which is the entire point of the object. The Dutch reed earlier in this course is there so you know what the old carvers reached for. I showed it, I put it down, and this board got very little abrasive of any kind.

When does the gouge finally turn up

At the very end, for the border. One gouge, a number 8, 10mm across, and it is the first gouge in the whole beginner path.

Mine is an Ashley Iles, made in England, and one of my favorites. Anything near that number and that size does the same job.

The numbering throws people. Number 1 is a straight chisel, dead flat, with no curve anywhere in it. A skew is that same blade ground at an angle. Gouges begin at 3 and run to 9, and a 9 is a deep U, the point where a true gouge stops. After that you are into veiners, V tools and the odd specialty shape.

Hold it with your hand close to the end of the blade, close enough that you can still see what you are doing, and the other hand steering. Then walk it round the perimeter, cut beside cut, until the border reads as a frame. Do not force it. If a chip will not fly out, go round again. The tools course covers the rest of the family.

Can you stain wood without chemicals

Boil what your kitchen throws away. Boiled onion husk makes a dark stain with a red cherry cast. Walnut shells make the one I like best, the true walnut color, and that is what went on this board.

My wife saves the onion husk for me whenever she cooks. It goes in a pan with water and about a teaspoon of baking soda. After ten minutes you have a yellow brown. Keep it going and the red comes up, and four hours gives you the color you saw.

The shells get the same treatment, and you do not need many. Both are safe on a board that will hold food, which is the whole reason for using them.

When I was in a Russian jail, I had to make some furniture and some marquetry and so on. But sometimes I didn't have any veneers to do real marquetry.

Birch plywood and homemade stains are what I had then. A longer story than this page holds. That is where I learned what boiled husk can do, so this is not a craft trick I read about somewhere.

Work fast on an open area. The stuff behaves like a dye, so if you stop halfway across the bird you get a hard line that will not come out. Applying a second coat over the first only deepens it.

Which homemade stain should you cook

Three of them work, and they cost nothing but an afternoon. All three are safe on something that will hold food, and that alone is why I put them near a board.

Four hours in the pan for the husk and for the shells, and the bark goes the same way. All of it boils with water and about a teaspoon of baking soda, and then it boils.

Try it on a scrap before it goes near the carving. It goes on like a dye, and there is no taking it back off. You can also brush one stain over another, which is how the onion husk went on around the bird, over the walnut.

What finish is food safe for a cutting board

Food-grade mineral oil, sold as butcher block finish. A pharmacy sells the same oil for less money, and it is the same stuff in the bottle. Mine cost about 8 dollars in the United States and will outlast the board.

Pour it on. Do not be careful with it. Boiled linseed oil works as well, and between the two of them they are most of what the old carvers had. A two-inch board drinks the first coat and asks for more, and four coats is usually what gets the sheen even. Wipe the surplus off after 20 minutes, then leave it about a week.

Beeswax is food safe too, and it is not water resistant, so a waxed board cannot go near the sink. That is why the oil wins here.

Want it to look old? Iron soaked in vinegar, brushed into the hollows over the natural stain, turns them nearly black. On bare wood it does almost nothing, which tells you it is reacting with the stain rather than the wood.

Can you really cut food on a carved board

You use the other side. Somebody asked me this online and it is a fair question. The carved face is the decorative one, and the plain back is where the food goes. Decorative boards are ordinary in European kitchens, and somebody on Reddit is who made me say so out loud.

Stain both faces if you want the piece to work for real. Mine stays decorative, so I left the sides bare, and I made it for the class rather than for my kitchen.

How long does a carving like this take

There is no end to it, and that is the honest answer. I could keep going. A thousand more ways to refine this board, add detail, make it more mine.

A thousand years ago people carved in this style without piling on detail, and their work holds up fine. So stop when the piece looks right to you, not when you run out of ideas. When it is done, a flower rosette is a fair next step, or a tray somebody will actually use.

What to remember before you start

• One knife carries this whole board, and a single gouge joins it.
• Basswood, sold as limewood or linden. Thicker stays flatter.
• Lay the three border lines down before anything else happens.
• Main movement first. Details last, and rub out whatever bothers you.
• Outline upright, and turn the board instead of your wrist.
• Boil walnut shells or onion husk and you have color with nothing chemical in it.
• Three or four coats of the butcher block oil. Then a week of leaving it alone.

Somewhere in your kitchen sits a plain board nobody has looked at twice in years. Browse the courses, find where you are on the map, or come and carve it with me. Find a wide board and one knife. Shall we carve?