Alexander Grabovetskiy, woodcarver, School of Woodcarving · Published 2019
How do you carve olive wood?
Quick answer: Carving olive wood is a trade. You get grain nothing else matches, and in exchange the wood is crunchy and hides voids and splits inside the slab. Work in smaller passes, come at a shape from behind it, and use the hardness to keep stems and leaf tips thin.
Carving olive wood is slower than carving lime. The grain is gorgeous and the inside is crunchy, full of voids and cracks you never see until the gouge finds one. So you take less at a pass, work in from the back of a shape, and you can leave detail thinner than you would dare in lime, because the wood itself is harder.
Have you tried carving a wood everybody warned you about? Do you own one slab too good to practice on? And what do you do when the client hands you a Bible verse instead of a drawing?
This box holds a Bible. The body is acacia, which the people who sold it to me call gopher wood, and the flowers and the olives on the lid are olive wood laid over it. My client asked for a design built on one line from the Song of Solomon, that you are a lily among the thorns. So the lid carries a lily, an acanthus movement running round it, small filler flowers, and olives on a stem. Three layers of wood to get there. I built the box first with plain miters on a compound miter saw, glued it up, and left the hinges for the end, because this course is not about building boxes, it is about carving on one.
What olive wood gives you, and what it takes back
- The grain is absolutely gorgeous, and that alone is why anybody puts up with the rest of it.
- Voids and cracks hide inside the slab. You find them with the gouge, not with your eyes.
- Olive is harder than lime, so a stem can stand at a sixteenth of an inch, about 1.5 mm.
- Two woods on one lid will never match in color. You blend them at the end.
- Twenty dollars buys a fretsaw that does everything a scroll saw does, only slower.
Why does olive wood carve differently from limewood?
Olive is harder than limewood, and at the same time it is crunchy. Those two words do not usually belong in one sentence. Hardness is why I can leave a stem far thinner here than in limewood I would leave that same stem twice as thick and still hold my breath while I did it. Crunchy is the other half of the bargain. Push the edge and the fibers break ahead of it instead of slicing, so you get a crumbled edge where you wanted a clean one.
Then there are the voids. This slab had knots I steered the whole design around, and a dark hollow at one end I could see from the outside. What you cannot see is how many more are inside. A void can open inside a petal while you are shaping it. That is the nature of the wood, and the numbers on olive tell you the hardness but not that.
So the technique changes. I remove less per pass. I work from the back side of a shape toward the front, so if something lets go it lets go in waste wood. And I stop before the piece asks me to, which is a hard habit to build when you can feel the form coming. Compare that with the way I attack basswood in the Hashemi flowers panel and it is almost a different craft.
What is gopher wood, and is it really acacia?
Most theologians think so, and nobody can say it for certain. Gopher is the name in the Bible for the wood of Noah's ark, and the word appears nowhere else, so the honest answer is that we do not know. What we do know is that acacia, the shittim wood of Exodus, is what the Ark of the Covenant was made from. More of them believe gopher is acacia than believe anything else. I am not trying to make you believe it. What I can tell you is the name the people who sell it use, and why holding the stuff makes me happy.
Here is what I actually think about while I carve it. That Ark was built about 3,600 years ago, in a wilderness, by a man the Bible says God filled with wisdom and knowledge and understanding, and with the ability to teach. That last part is the one I keep turning over. He was not working alone. The text says he taught other men to work beside him. And I wonder what tools they had out there, because whatever they were, they were not Ashley Iles gouges out of a leather roll.
Do you need a scroll saw to pierce a pattern?
A fretsaw will do it, and mine cost about 20 dollars. I use a scroll saw for this piece because I have a good one now, and I realize not everyone does. Every piece of pierced work I did back in Russia, all of it, I did with a fretsaw by hand.
My first woodworking tool in this country was a cheap scroll saw out of Lowe's. It was jumpy and shaky, getting a blade into it was a fight, and for a long while the old fretsaw was easier and truer than the machine. Years later I bought a good one and the difference is real, but the good machine is a convenience, not a requirement. Print the pattern, glue it down, saw around your lines, and keep the offcuts.
How close should the blade be to your finger?
About one and a half millimeters of blade, and no more. Here is how I hold it. One finger sits right at the edge of the work as a fence, the second finger rides slightly lower, and the blade never shows more steel than that past them. I wiggle the piece rather than shove it.
The honest part comes next. It is still possible to slip and cut yourself doing this. The machine has a sticker on it telling you to keep your hands away from the blade, and the sticker is right. If you do not feel comfortable working that close, do not. Step back, take a wider line, clean it up afterward with a gouge. A carving is not worth a fingertip.
Which gouges carve a lily?
Small ones, and fewer of them than you would guess. Almost everything on this lid came off a handful of small tools. Most of my work here is Ashley Iles steel out of England, and the sizes matter far more than the badge.
| Tool and number | The size I keep coming back to | Where it goes |
|---|---|---|
| Number 11 veiner | 1 mm, and this is the workhorse of the whole lid | stems |
| Number 11 again | 0.5 mm | the line under a petal that only shows as shadow |
| Number 11, the wide one | 2 mm | hollows the body of a petal |
| Number 8 gouge | an eighth of an inch, about 3 mm | rounds the olives and the small buds |
| Number 7 gouge | a sixteenth inch across, roughly a millimeter and a half | leaf hollows |
| Number 3 | flat enough to blend one facet into the next | blending |
Those stems come out under 1.5 mm in places, and that was the plan rather than an accident. I left almost no space between them on purpose. A crowded stem reads as fine work, and the same stem with room around it reads as one solid lump. The 1 mm number 11 puts the line in between, and if you have never bought a gouge that small, the whole vocabulary is in All About Tools for Wood Carving. None of these work dull, and sharpening has a course to itself for a reason.
The lily is the focal point, so it gets carved separately and set in. I clamped it and worked it in the round, which let me get behind the petals and give them somewhere to lift from. A lily has a shape your eye already knows, which cuts both ways. Get the petal turn right and anybody sees a lily. Get it wrong and anybody sees that too.
The filler flowers are the size of a thumbnail and there are a lot of them. I carve those in the hand, off the piece, and glue them in place afterward. Same layered thinking runs through the Venetian flowers rosette and through the grape onlay, only smaller and in a wood that fights back.
How do you blend two woods that do not match?
Tint the light one down with a brush and water. By the time the carving was done I had acacia underneath, olive wood over it, and even the olive did not match itself. One area came out really light and it just did not look right beside the rest. So I mixed a universal tint colorant, a bottle of raw umber Cal-Tint, with plain water and went at it with ordinary artist brushes in a few sizes.
Raw umber is the color to reach for because it is the base of nearly every earthy brown you would want. Thin it and it stains gently. Two aims here. First the blending, then some shading in the low spots so the whole lid reads like it has been around a long time. Not real patina, which is oxidation over years of sun and air and which goes grey. Grey is not what I wanted. I wanted the warm version of old.
Thomas W. Wallis, a wood carver, wrote in his autobiography about the motto printed in large letters across the end of his schoolroom.
What man has done, man may do again.
That sentence has done more for my students than any technique I teach. Somebody carved that chest in a wilderness with tools we cannot even name. Baroque altars carved 300 years ago are still standing. You are holding better steel than either of them owned. The design is learnable, the acanthus is learnable, and the rest is bench hours.
Why a lily among thorns?
The client picked the verse and I had to make thorns beautiful. Everybody hears thorns and pictures something ugly, and that is not what a thorn bush looks like. When I was a boy I used to stay with my grandmother out in the Russian countryside, and there was a forest close by with wild thorns in it. Real spikes, sharp, some of them an inch and a half or two inches long, forty to fifty millimeters of thorn. And the bush was not ugly at all. It looked beautiful.
So that is what we had to do on this lid. Make the thorns nice. They run through the acanthus movement behind the flower, sharp where the verse needs them sharp, and shaped like something you would want to look at. The verse is about being the one good thing in a hard place. Carving it that way seemed like the point.
What goes inside the box?
A Bible goes inside, so the inside had to be finished properly. Hinges went on the back at the very end. The interior got flocked, which means a fine fiber blown onto glue with a little hand flocker until the surface comes up like felt, and the product is sold under the name Flock-It. Not much work at all, and it changes how the box feels when somebody opens it.
I sanded the olives off camera, which I mention because I do not sand much and somebody always notices. Those olives are small round domes and they wanted to be smooth. The acanthus kept its tool facets, because facets throw shadow and shadow is most of what carving is.
Is 14 lessons enough to carve a box like this?
For a second or third project it is more than enough, and for a first one it is the wrong place to start. The course runs 14 lessons across 142 video parts, and it follows this one commissioned box from the paper pattern to the flocked interior. Every mistake is in there. That includes the spots where I say out loud that I took off more than I meant to.
If you have never held a gouge, go and carve something flat first. First Cuts for Beginners exists for that, and a flower rosette in basswood will teach you the petal moves for the price of a board you will not cry over. Come back to olive wood when a ruined slab would annoy you instead of stopping you. Then take on a tray or a plate, where the object has a job as well as a face.
Tuition here pays for orphans and widows, and it puts children through art lessons their families could not pay for, which is the situation I grew up in. The whole catalog is on the lessons map if you want to read the shelf before you decide, and the in person workshops are there if you would rather stand at a bench next to me. Access runs monthly or yearly, renews automatically each period until you stop it, and you stop it from your own account. Both plans sit on the Access page.
So what is sitting on your bench right now that you have been too careful to carve?
How it's done
- Build the box first. Plain miters on a compound miter saw hold up fine, and the hinges can wait until every carving is done.
- Print and glue the pattern down. Paper goes onto the acacia lid and onto the olive slab, so every line you will saw is drawn already.
- Steer the design around the knots. Knots and open voids belong in the offcuts, never under a petal you plan to undercut later.
- Saw the pierced work. Either saw works here. By hand it takes longer and reaches the same place for twenty dollars.
- Set the first layer into the lid. Small details drop straight into the acacia, which keeps the flat parts of the design below the flowers.
- Rough the acanthus in olive wood. Movements come before detail. Big shapes decide whether an eye travels round the lid or stops halfway.
- Carve the lily on its own. A clamp holds the flower while you reach in behind the petals. Only then does it go down onto the lid.
- Leave the stems until last. One millimeter of number 11 puts the line in between them, and the finished stems are the thinnest thing on the lid.
- Carve the small flowers in hand. Thumbnail sized pieces are far easier to shape off the panel, and each one gets glued down once its form reads right.
- Blend the color, then line the box. Raw umber tint thinned with water evens the two woods out. Fiber blown onto glue turns the inside to felt.
Frequently asked questions
Is olive wood good for carving?
Olive rewards you and punishes you. The figure is the best I have worked with, and the material is brittle enough that a stem can crumble instead of slicing. A first project should use something else. On a piece somebody keeps for good, it is worth the trouble.
What is gopher wood in the Bible?
Gopher is the wood Noah was told to build with, and the word appears once in the whole text, so nobody can identify it with certainty. Most theologians land on acacia. Acacia is also the shittim wood the Ark of the Covenant was built from, which is why the two get spoken of together.
Can you carve two different woods on one piece?
Carving across two species on a single lid is ordinary work, and their color will never match. Carve everything first, then thin a universal tint with water and brush the lighter wood down until the two agree. Shading the low spots afterward makes the whole thing read older than it is.
What to carve next