How to Carve a Super Simple Santa Ornament -One Knife, Full Woodcarving Tutorial

All right, we are back again with another tutorial. It was about a year ago that I made a little quick little video called the Quick and Quirky Santa and it was not a tutorial and many of you wished it had been at the time. It was just a little 10 minute video with some music behind it I believe and that's what we're going to do today. Knife only project. Anybody can do this like absolutely anybody. Don't get too caught up on the details a little bit straying here or there it's fine it doesn't matter but I'm going to go through and we're going to do one just like this using a three inch piece of basswood an inch and a half square but not really because I split it in half so let me show you a couple ways that I split the wooden half. You've seen this before but this is just a two by four with two 45 degree cuts on the table saw. Just cut off two 45s and that gives you your center. Find my blade there tighten her up there and put my piece of wood on there and cut it like that. There you go. Now you say I don't have all these fancy tools I can't split my wood. Well if you look at the grain of your wood and kind of get close to it all right I'm just going to set that here and uh keeping in mind that we don't have to have a perfect cut. I scalped the back with the gouge on this one in fact I even I even bellied it curved it both ways so it's not that critical as long as you're following your grain put your uh chisel knife hatchet whatever you got give her a little love tap all right there's your piece of wood okay so that's super simple and there's no reason why you can't make this uh carving and like I said you can clean up the back you can take a gouge and scallop it you can belly it but uh yeah you don't have to have all that fancy stuff to uh split your wood. Let's just kind of mark center on that center is let's say center is the center of the nose so we're going to span the nose over that center mark okay let's just start off with cutting that nice and deep this is the bottom of the nose all right I'll dig that in there pretty good now let's mark the top of the nose same way this is going to come in now we've got this uh bottom of our nose here I want to uh bring those flare it up on the side a bit just bring it up a little bit a little bit of a bottom and then the same thing on the top we're going to bring that down I'm going to come down like so on each side so now you see here I'm cutting back the bottom see that angle see how that angle is back to the nose I want that uh I want that nice uh nice back angle on the eyes all right there you go go a little bit deeper even a little bit deeper there we go all right now let's just pretend our nose here we're going to uh bring some angles in on the nose all right come don't cut in this way cut in this way kind of kind of straight away bring that around this way there we go okay that's a boxy looking nose right let's just kind of clean it up a little bit not getting super detailed on the on the features if it looks like a nose it's a nose all right just thinning it up a little bit all right something like that okay then our uh our eyes I'm going to keep playing with this nose what I want that top a little bit thinner a little bit thinner there okay that little eye shelf there I'm just going to come a bit on an angle do it one more time just a little bit deeper so our center mark should be center of our nose still on our eyes like so now let's take that bottom of the nose let's bring that over to the sides basically I'm just going to come put a little little v-cut on there now on this side this is basically the ball for the hat and on this side it's the uh the hair see that all right you can uh all these thin edges I don't like to keep a thin edge anywhere because you can roll that break that off just with your uh running your finger over it so I like to thicken up the uh the edges a little bit these are all going to come down anyway and be cut off but uh just for anything in the future don't keep a sharp edge on it because you're gonna lose it all right let's just take this off too for now and take some of these corners off just to see where we're headed all right so we're gonna put the uh well let's let's take the this back a little bit here I'm going to show you right away we're going to draw the eyes in and they're not going to be uh just the cartoon eyes again and they're not going to be huge but if we just draw those in even you don't even have to cut them in but if we just draw them in and we know where the brim of our hat's going to be all right I'm just going to draw a line just above the eyes you can see just a bit of a curve there it's all going to be thinned down but I just want to have that set in place and uh yeah so let's pretend we got our ball here all right let's draw the hat like I said this is so uh whatever you do is fine you know what I mean like there's no uh there's no right or wrong that's why I say it's a super simple easy project let's cut the corner off of there the corner off of there see we were making our hat shape already let's cut that ball in all the way around let's kind of dig it dig it in with the little little v-cut with your knife just kind of set that in place like I said we're not we're not going to finish it we're setting it in place but we want to get that cut of the uh the hat flop we want that hat flop over before we run our brim of our hat into it all right so let's do that right now now this is a fairly good deep cut make sure you got your uh your safety glove on and save some some cuts flatten that out a bit all right see very easy let's start taking some of these edges off we want the uh we don't want any of these uh saw marks on the top either we're gonna put some little little whoop-de-doos and whatnot in here just to give it some character okay but I want to cut that let's get let's get those saw marks out there we're getting there see how the difference here now you can see the space that I have here I want the same space over here now that is a hair on this side but the ball hides the hair on this side okay so we're gonna do this like that and uh we're gonna shorten up the hat now and then we're gonna bring the hair you'll see it all makes sense but uh we can kind of roughly say you have a brim of a hat too just thin this up here put a little cut in here that'll be the bottom of the hair or the bottom of the hat sorry bring the hair up you can see how that that goes we just want to keep eyeballing this side and this side we kind of want them to be they don't have to be exact but they should be similar okay so I'm going to take the bottom of the hat here I'm going to draw a line with my knife right around like that right into that other cut okay now I'm going to come underneath just removing that never put the hat on top of the head the hat encompasses the head that's a big uh mistake a lot of people make is that the uh the hat looks like it's sitting on top of the head instead of over the head you can see now where our eyes are just about right okay there we go we're getting there now looking at our nose here we're gonna have our beard up here is gonna be very simple we're gonna have a little little uh like I said that ball seems to come in so let's take this uh hair yeah like I said we can come we can take the bottom off too right away come up to the hair okay yeah something like that and then make that little transition from the beard give like a nice nice cheek so I want that I want that nice deep b right to the both sides I'm going to cut a little bit of an angle I'm going to do the exact same thing in the bottom be nice deep that will also bring out the bottom of the nose yeah that brings the nose out okay put that cut in here too and the same on this side I'm just going to run that knife right under there there we go if we want we can come up beside the nose on each side just a little extra a little extra there we are now we've got this uh pretty much settled where we want to have everything we can bring the uh the beard around around the around the bottom more same thing with the the bottom cell marks we're going to cut them off there now the beard itself it can be as random as you want you can do a windswept one way or the other but uh like I said we're just keeping this super simple now let's dig let's highlight some of these things like this ball here let's let's get that in there deeper all the way around let's just get that like it's keeping those cuts up same as these corners here let's thin this temple area out here come up into that corner like so same with these anywhere there's a anywhere we can get a little three corner little chip cut always gives a nice little shadow a little extra see that all right so we can uh let's just take a pencil don't want to get too too fancy again all we're going to do is a couple cuts knife bring that mustache up there'll be no mouth no nothing just a nice easy mustache this is actually a real fun little curve this is so simple and people get so caught up on trying to follow something exactly where it's totally not necessary just have fun with it if something's it makes no difference because who knows only you right and it's not wrong that's the beauty it's never wrong I'm always trying to get that extra little corner in there see that adds a little shadow a little point in there all right you can make that I'm making this mustache fairly square you can make it rounder but uh now I said look at that I said well this is nice and round this isn't so let's go over here and round that bring that in a little bit more all right my hair can be a little bit more swooped okay we're missing the uh the brim of the hat choose your your thickness of the brim what do you call that the trim when we come to the outside we want that brim sit out I keep calling brim is it a brim hat brim sure all right well let's just uh attack the eyes I'm cutting in just a little bit of a a little bit angle into the eye you've seen me do this a hundred times on other carvings the cartoon eyes just sticking my knife in a little bit of an angle I'm coming out I'm going to put a little cut on the bottom straight in pop that corner out same on this side a little cut out the corner get the corner fully all right it's going to come up underneath see that there you go there is santa so now what you want to do you want you want to add some character a couple little twists and turns and whatever if you want to go taller you can make a pointier cap all right yeah the hair is out here so I want to bring that in and you know what from here it's whatever you want now when you look at these guys here what I do this one here I made the beard and it's the cuts they're just random cuts this one here let's just put a couple random cuts in here nice bold cuts now always think always be thinking about the uh the wood that uh when you're pushing like that that could split so keep your fingers out of harm's way at all times but uh there you go a little bit of a bump there we don't have to have that we can take any cut we can go a little bit we can go on the bottom bring it right around all adds a little bit of different character if you take a v-cut if you take one side a little bit over there so we got there you go I mean if you want to do a little bit of a few more little little facets on everything you can but for a quick video sake I would say but you've got your Santa Claus I'm looking at him again really quick I just realized I thinned the temple on one side but not the other side so then that a little bit you know just kind of just kind of bringing that temple in put your finger on both sides you can feel it better good so take a few minutes go around carving sharpen up any of these uh little cuts or deepen them here or there make some create some shadows but uh yeah we just look at it now here's something that you might want to do too like I said before this one here you see how I bellied that or not bellied it rounded the back you can uh you got lots of play on both sides you can take your knife and uh you know clean up the back you know just contour okay or take a gouge and just put gouge marks in like that yeah but uh for now all we have to do is uh get a little little eye screw and a little wire you buy these once because you buy a package these little hooks and you get like 500 but uh just get some little eye screws find center with your nose put your little eye screw on there involves your uncle all right there he is there is our super simple Santa ornament a lot of fun it is it's a fun quick little carving that's uh they're so satisfying and I mean really you'll be cranking these out in 10 minutes max and uh yeah it doesn't hurt as much to give away to people either when you when you make a quick little carving so uh look at the painting on this you'll know I have a couple videos on painting uh make sure you get a little bit of dry brushing on there again I have a dry brushing video but uh yeah paint them up I didn't go with the colors on the eyes I just put a black dot with a little white highlight so keeping it simple and uh yeah have fun with these and I will be back with another video sooner than later big thanks to uh those who uh bought me a coffee this week and uh purchased merch as well uh always appreciated never expected but uh it sure does uh help the channel and uh keep me motivated to to make more so until the next one signing off and uh I'll see you around guys later