Wood Carving: First Cuts for Beginners

Almost every great carver, living or long gone, started at the same bench you are standing at. Not with a wall of gouges. One knife, a piece of soft wood, and a line drawn across the grain.

My teacher did the same with me. He kept me on one knife for a long time before he handed me a gouge, so we keep that order here too.

What knife do you need to start wood carving

One knife. A number 12 Swiss made chip carving knife is the one I reach for, and the one on my bench has been with me for 20 years. Not the cheapest knife on the shelf, and worth every dollar.

That knife paid my rent. It bought my food and the clothes on my back, and the work I carved with it ran into tens of thousands of dollars over the years. One purchase, and it is still going.

Do not reach for the cheap one to save a few dollars. I know the cheap brands. The steel is not stable, it will not last you as long, and it breaks really easily. You can break a good knife easily too. I would still tell you to buy a really good tool from the beginning.

Shops sell it under the chip carving name. We are not going to do chip carving with it.

What wood should a beginner carve on

Basswood. The same tree is sold as limewood or linden in Europe, and in Russia, where I grew up, we call it липа, lipa. Soft enough for a knife, firm enough to hold a detail, and almost no visible grain.

In the United States you can walk into Michaels and buy basswood planks off the craft shelf, or order from Woodcraft. In England ask for lime timber. Everywhere else, find your local carving supplier and ask for linden. Some other cultures just call it the tea tree, because you can brew tea from the linden flowers.

Whatever you carve today does not have to be a fresh board. The piece I work on in these videos is a leftover from another project.

What else do you need besides the knife

A flat surface, a clamp and a pencil. The whole shop, right there.

You do not need a workbench. I have carved plenty of good work on a kitchen table, and you are not swinging a mallet here, so any solid surface holds up. Clamp the wood down, and a simple clamp is all it takes.

What you need	The one on my own bench
Knife	Swiss number 12
Wood	Basswood, sold as limewood, linden or lipa
Practice board	A flat offcut, plus a strip about 20mm wide and 10mm thick
Holding	One clamp on any solid table
Marking	A pencil, drawn freehand

What is the safest way to hold a carving knife

Set the handle in your palm and squeeze it tight, keep the blade facing your body, and pull toward yourself. For the small shapes you can hold it the way you hold a pencil. Both grips are correct, and you will see me switch between them in these lessons.

One rule never bends. Your hand never goes in front of the blade. Not while you carve, and not while your other hand steadies the piece. The edge is going somewhere, and your fingers should not be there when it arrives.

What are the three basic knife angles in wood carving

Ninety degrees straight down, then that same line taken at an angle from the right and from the left. Everything in this course is built out of those three.

Draw a straight line across the grain in three separate places on your board. On all three lines, put the knife straight down and pull it toward you. Call it your 90 degree pass. The two angles that follow both lean on it.

Back on the first line, start about 5mm out from it, near enough to 3/16 of an inch, and come in at an angle until you feel the bottom of that straight pass. A clean chip lifts away. If the chip does not want to leave, do not pry it. Go back down the straight line once more and it comes out on its own.

Second line, same move, mirrored to the left. Then do both sides into the middle on the third line and look at what falls out. A clean, even chip means both angles traveled to the same depth. That is the whole point of the exercise. You are teaching your hand how deep it is going, and no video can do that part for you.

The idea is to train your hand to feel how deep you have to go with your knife.

What can a beginner carve with just a knife

A stem with a few leaves, drawn freehand. Right angle, then left angle, and the leaf drops out of the board.

Tiny leaves let you skip the straight pass in the middle and go right then left. If that feels shaky, put the straight line back in. Hold the knife like a pencil for these. The leaves are tiny.

You can see there is some carving done already. Not a masterpiece. Carving.

Which molding is simplest to carve with a knife

Take a strip about 20mm wide and 10mm thick and divide it into equal spaces about 20mm long. In inches it is three quarters wide and three eighths thick, and I mark a space every three quarters of an inch.

Draw the division lines across the strip at roughly 90 degrees, and draw them by hand. Put the ruler down. Later on you will need to draw and design, and your hand gets the feel for drawing right here. If a line is not accurate, that's fine. Pretend you live 4,000 years ago and a knife is all you own.

Take the knife straight down every line, not deep. Then draw a diagonal from corner to corner in each space. Now the knife position changes. Turn the point away from your body, begin at the high corner of the diagonal, and skew down toward the middle, about 2mm deep. Two passes are fine. Three are fine.

Then flip the strip, clamp it again, and work the other side of every space a little deeper. Look at it under a lamp when you are done. The shadow does the work. You find this kind of carving in Greek work and in other old European cultures too.

Can you carve a leaf that sits above the background

Turn the idea around. Leave the leaf flat and carve the wood around it instead.

Put a soft S line down the board and hang a few larger leaves off it. Angle the knife along every line of the leaf, right side first, then swap and take the left, and feel for the point where the two meet. Now mark a second outline about 5mm outside the leaf and carve in toward it.

The leaf sits up while the space around it drops. Same angles, opposite result.

Do you draw the design before you carve it

Draw a boundary line about a quarter inch in from the edge, then a second line about an eighth of an inch inside that one. No part of the design crosses the boundary. Nothing else about the layout is a rule.

Then draw. A swirl on the left, the same swirl mirrored on the right, a leaf where the space looks empty, another leaf turned the other way to fill the corner. I design these on camera as I go, so you watch me change my mind. Later on, people would call a swirl like this a volute, but it is not a true one. It was around before any volutes.

Which direction do you carve with the grain

Start at the top of your line and follow it down, so the blade runs with the grain and the carving goes much easier.

Keep the angle low. Low angle, follow the line, and when the chip does not release, repeat the identical pass instead of forcing it. Some spots take two passes. Some take three, or even more. And you will sweat, because it is a real workout.

Where two angled passes come together, the wood should break clean and sharp, with no fuzz. Come back and repeat the pass until it does.

Is one knife carving the same as chip carving or relief carving

No. Chip carving is geometric and came later in history. Relief carving usually has a background, and here there is no background at all.

Everything on that board is a V groove, or a right angle and a left angle meeting on a line you cannot see. No punches in the background, because there is no background, and because in ancient times they did not use punches.

You will hear it called Viking carving. Archaeologists did find boats with really heavy carved designs on them, and the Vikings really did work this way. So did German carvers, Slavic carvers, and some cultures in Asia. The Viking era sits about a thousand years back, and carving was already old by then. You find these same shapes on European work from the seventh and eighth centuries, well before the complicated carving arrived.

The leaves here are not acanthus. The acanthus came up through Greece and Rome and reached Europe later, and it has its own course.

This is where a hand learns to feel the three-dimensional world, and every kind of carving after this one goes quicker because of it. Train your hand on this and true relief carving gets much easier when you come to it.

What makes a carved design look finished

Put a V groove down the middle of each leaf and refine the outline with a low angle. It was common in the old work, and it makes the leaves look even more beautiful.

Clean every meeting point. When it is done right, you can blow on the piece and all the chips fly away. Then look at it again. Maybe it is going to be more visible like this.

Nothing stops you from running this border as far as you have wood. Frames. The sides of a jewelry box, window casing, the apron under a table, and I have run this same border along the sides of coffered ceilings.

How long does it take to get good at wood carving

Nobody can tell you that, because it all depends on you and the work you put in. Somebody wrote to me asking what level he would reach in one month, in two months, in a year.

I pay for a gym every month. I like going. But it would be foolish of me to ask what results I will get in two months if I do not exercise. Young guys come in, pump dumbbells for one day, then walk to the mirror to see what grew. Nothing grew. Do not be a child about it.

Somebody once asked me what the richest place on earth is. It is the cemetery. All those people with a gift they never used, buried right there with them. If there is a talent in you, I would like you to spend it.

So you do have your potential inside of you, and you can become a really good wood carver.

How do you make the space between two leaves stand out

Blade upright first, then a low angle pass running toward that line. Between two leaves, it gives a really beautiful look.

I stand the blade up in the gap. Then I come in at a low angle, travel down to where the upright pass ends, and lift the waste out. The wall it leaves is steep on one side and sloped on the other. A few more passes and the design is done.

What do you do with the board once it is carved

Send me a photograph of it. Students upload a photo of their practice board on the assessment page, and I review it.

The leafy design is also up as a drawing printed to size, so you can download it and carve my lines instead of inventing your own on day one. Carve it, then send the photograph. A board that goes wrong costs you one more piece of wood, and that is all a mistake costs here. Another beginner course here carves a bird of paradise onto a kitchen cutting board.

What to remember before your first pass

• A single good knife is enough to start, and it lasts decades.
• Basswood, limewood, linden, lipa. One tree with four names, depending on where you live.
• Three angles carry every project here. Ninety degrees, right, left.
• Pull the knife toward you and keep your other hand behind the edge.
• Carve in the direction of the grain, because that is much easier than going against it.
• If the chip will not lift, repeat the pass. Never pry it out.
• Clamp the wood. A kitchen table is a workshop.

Buy the knife and find a scrap of basswood. Shall we carve?