How to Wood Carve with a Dremel Tool - The Basic Beginner's Guide

Hey friends, I am going to teach you how to wood carve with a Dremel or any type of rotary tool. In this video, I will be teaching you some advanced techniques you will want to know, so come hang out with me. We are going to have a lot of fun. As I said in my other videos, a lot of tutorials will show you how to carve, but today I actually want to teach you. So let me show you some of the accessories and tools that I will be using in this video. Number one, the Dremel stylo. This happens to be my favorite Dremel tool. This is lightweight and can handle anywhere from small to medium sized projects as long as you let the burr do the work for you. The second thing that we need is the wood, of course, and if you have been watching this channel for any amount of time, you know I love these little gift boxes. I got this from a local craft store called Hobby Lobby and this is a little piece of basswood and it's really soft and it works great with the Dremel stylo. The third accessory that we need is a dust mask. Be sure to wear one of these because this can kick up some fine dust. Don't forget the safety glasses as well. The bits I will be using today are the Dremel 105 and 106 round carbide engraving bits. I am also using the Lasco burrs SG1 and SG2 inverted comb burrs and a cheap carbide flame burr that I got from Amazon. Since we are going to engrave the lid of this gift box, I want to sand the top of the surface to make it real smooth. You don't have to do this but it is preferred on almost everything that I do. The design that we are going to carve is this flower. I put carbon transfer paper on the other side and a piece of tape right here. So we are going to put this on the box here. There we go. Now we are going to trace this. After you transfer the design, always get a pencil and thicken up all your edges. I got a rotating easel that I am going to be using for the carving because it makes my life so much easier. We have the Dremel 106 bit inserted into the stylo so we are going to turn this to the highest speed and turn it on. And what we are going to be doing is going to go around the edges. Now watch this. I am going to grab the box with my left hand and just kind of relax my right hand and start tracing the image. Okay guys, when you do this, you want to keep consistent depth and we are going to just lightly score the edge. I am pulling to the left and away from me. Pay attention to this part. I am going to go one more time. I am going to turn this. Have confidence here guys. This is super simple. Just keep a strong hand on the tool and let the burr do the work for you. I may have to cut this part short because I got this too long. You notice how I am not going back and forth. That will make a messy carving. Just pull to your left and down. Notice that I am stopping for my sharp points and I am turning the box. Okay guys, we got the outside of this scored but I got some inconsistent depth. So I am going to go around this one more time then get on the insides. Okay, now we are going to go around the round part of the flower right here in the center. Anytime that you are power carving, what is happening is that the end of the burr or bit is grabbing into the wood and removing that wood. Because of that, the burr will have what you call burr hop or burr runaway. So make sure that you have a steady grip on the power tool of your choice when doing this. Just keep a steady hand and try to stay at a consistent depth. There we go. I am going to lightly sand the top of this to get all the fuzzies off. I am not going to do this too hard, just enough to get some definition in here. For the next part, I am going to rough out right here where the petals begin because I want this to be more of a 3D effect coming out. I am just going to kind of slant this in right here, just kind of in the middle there. I am going to have the flowers fold out on the sides and kind of scoop down and go back up. I am going to go at an angle and just knock everything here at a 45, just like this. Now you just want to get the middle of them, okay, and just kind of taper out to the side. Okay, for the next part, I am going to take a piece of sandpaper, fold it up like this, make it round, and this, I think it's 304 grit. It's an odd grit, but it works. I am going to get right here in the center and start sanding where I carved at. Don't do too much, just lightly sand, and this is going to knock out all the nasty markings from the carbide burr. Get in the divot we just made, and when I do this, I am getting the middle and I am laying the sandpaper over like this and knocking that bevel down. So middle, then move to the right just like this, lay it over, lay it to the left. We are going to go around the middle here. Look at that. That is looking really good when you see the shadows in there. Okay, this is a very important part. Usually I would put stippling around here, which is a bunch of random dots to break up the background, but I don't want to do that because I want this to look more like a traditional wood carving. So I am going to take the, and I believe this is the SG1 burr from Lasco Burrs. I am going to put it on the edges and start flattening the edges down at a 45 degree angle. I'm going to go around the side and do this as well. This is the most tedious part, but this is my favorite burr. I will have links for everything you see below. You need to get one of these. This is my secret behind my pyre carvings, to make them clean. This one burr right here. So how you want to do this is take the stylo, put the cord behind you to get it out of the way. And the next part is to put the edge of this inverted burr at a 45, and slowly, and hear me when I say this, slowly trace the outer edges. And you can really mess this up. Keep this at a 45 degree angle. I'm going to hold the box at an angle too. Look how nice that looks. I'm going to have to make my kind of curve here, which is one of the most difficult things. Kind of take it in steps if you need to. There we go. I need to lay it down a little bit more. And here's the secret. I'm actually undercutting some of this too with the edge of this burr. Look how much better that looks after one pass. It just inset everything here. And I want to point out something for you. Do you see the edges of the flower right here? How it kind of curves down? Well, my bevel is doing the same thing. My bevel is following the contour of the flower. This is the secret right here. Now I need to do this probably two more times to get the depth that I want and just to lay it over just a little bit more. But now we need to go to inside of the flower and get these small leaves on the outside. So we're going to get in the corner here, or on the edge rather, and just start laying it over. I'm actually going to make a cut down the middle here. I'm going to do the inside edges as well. I am getting on all the edges of the flower and making straight line cuts. Now I'm going to go to the inside and just lightly go around the middle. Let's sand this off a little bit. I mean, look at that already. That is turning out so cool. So we are going to go around the edges again, get that more defined, and sand inside of the leaves a little bit more and just make them a little bit deeper. One quick thing you can see where I scratched the outside of my box with the quick release. So what I'm going to do is to take the sandpaper and to fix this, I'm going to sand a large area around it and on it. And you can see it starting to disappear. Just don't do it in this one spot. Get all the area around it as well. This is already taking form and looking really good, but we are going to put some more just finer touches on this because we have some edges that's less than desirable. And as far as the small parts of the leaf coming out from underneath the flower here, I'm going to take this and how we were going at the 45. I'm going to lay it over even more and just make that bevel deeper. Now I want this on both sides because I want everything to be symmetrical. Now I'm going to come here to the front and do the same thing. This is going to help our image be three-dimensional. Already looking better. Now after that I have to come in here to the side and do the outside again. I got to be careful because I'm starting to get really deep now. You don't have to carve really deep to get good three-dimensional carvings. So I'm going to go do all of the parts of the leaf coming out from underneath the flower. Now the next part, what we're going to do here, I've already sanded out the middle of this. I kind of want to take some more out there. So I am going to take a fresh strip of sandpaper and this is the 305 grit. I probably need a little bit more of a coarser grit. I'm going to take this and sand the inside and when I sand just like before, get the sides and in the middle. I'm going to go around the flower and do this just to deepen the depth of it. Now I am going to take my 400 grit sandpaper and do the top of it and this is a very important part because this will actually straighten up a lot of your lines. Look how good that looks already. This is so simple guys. Anybody could do this. Sandpaper is like makeup that removes. It can actually remove definition from what you are doing. So just we're going to go in here and clean up all the edges and the markings that the burr left. All right, this is looking really good. Now what I did, I just kept sanding and put some more divots on the edges of the flowers with my low grit sandpaper and I'm going through the high grit now and just knocking off some of the rough edges but we are 95% done. Next, I am going to take some rubbing alcohol and spray on the wood here and wipe it off and what this is going to do is bring some of the wood grain to the top, the high fibrous pieces of the wood. That way I can sand them and make them smooth but look at that. So cool. All done with this little stylo right here. You can take this and sell it or make gifts for people at Christmas. Just all kinds of cool stuff. When I did that, it revealed all my flaws. So I'm just going to go through here with some sandpaper and just hit the areas that I see that needs a little TLC. To finish, we are using a bristle disc. This is very useful for getting in the cracks and crevices and just cleaning up the little fuzzies everywhere. Now run this at a slow RPM and go around the edge of your whole design. Okay, we are done. Are you ready? Here it is. I think this turned out super cool and guys, I didn't spend a lot of time on this. This is probably about 20 minutes. If you guys take these skills and techniques that you learned here with the different burrs and apply them to your different power carvings, I promise they are going to turn out looking fantastic with some practice. If you guys are interested in following along, I will post links below to purchase this flower. I bought it from an Etsy shop and I think it was like $2 and it came with all kinds of different flowers. So it would be a good idea to do that so you guys can practice. This would be fun for the whole family to do and it would bring you together and you could be creative. And you know what? This wasn't that hard. I bet you could do it with minimal effort if you put in the time and practice what I showed you. I am still learning myself. I do not have it all together. I am just teaching you as I go along. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Hit the subscribe button below if you haven't done so and be sure to like it and also share the video with a friend if you have found it helpful. I will post all the links to all the tools that I used below. You guys check it out and do not forget to download my free ebook at howtowoodcarve.com and I will see you in the next video. I appreciate you. Go out and have fun and be creative.