How to Whittle a Simple Christmas Tree - Beginner Whittling Project

Hello and welcome to this beginner whittling project. In this project today we are going to look at how to whittle a simple tree, could be a Christmas tree or just a pine tree, from a piece of 1 by 1 by 2 inch basswood. And to do that today I'm going to be using a 1 and 7 eighths inch knife from Deep Holler Knives. You can use whatever knife you have. This is just this great simple little project. You can choose to decorate it as a Christmas tree if you would like to. It could just be a regular pine tree. You could do this in all sorts of different sizes and things. So let's go ahead and get started. I have my 1 by 1 by 2 inch piece of basswood here and you can see that to mark this off first what I'm going to do is put a center line on each side and I've done that on three of my sides already. I'm just going to do it right here. Put a vertical center line there and then what I'm doing is I am marking on the outsides of each face at horizontal lines at half inch intervals. This is at a half an inch up. This is at a half inch, a half inch, a half inch. So I'm going to mark that off really just by extending that down from the other side and if you've watched some of my other videos you're kind of familiar with this process. It's a great way to take your block of wood and kind of flatten it out into a little bit more of a 2d piece. So the first thing I'm going to do before I draw the rest of my pattern lines in is I'm going to carve off the entire front face of this all the way between this midpoint line and that midpoint line on each side. I'm just going to use some nice easy push cuts to do that and again you might take a few more cuts to do this that's fine. I always start one direction and I'm really trying to get that flat down so that surface is completely flat between these two center lines. Okay once I get that end mostly well I'm going to turn it around and go the other way. I can feel that breaking a little bit. Remember if you start to feel it breaking it means that carving in the other direction will help. So I'm going to turn that around to do my end flattening out and just go really lightly skimming over the edge to flatten that out. Okay so that is pretty good on that side. I'm just going to go quickly and do the same thing on the other side. You of course can take as many steps and cuts as you need to for this. I'm just going to do it out here real quickly for the sake of time. Now once I have this flat I'm going to go ahead and draw the rest of my pattern on. There we go. All right so I took that square block of wood just flattened the corner off the front and the back and I have those reference lines at half inch intervals on the outsides. So I'm going to draw kind of the profile outline of my tree onto that. So if this is the bottom that means I'm going to connect this about like that. I'm just going to eyeball this. It's going to be good enough for me. You could get your ruler out and then on the top so what I'm going to do is I'm going to remove this part here and remove this part here and remove this part here and on the top I'm going to mark just a center at the top middle here and I'm going to extend this line all the way out to there which means that I'm going to remove this whole part over here. All right so let me just quickly repeat that on the other side. Okay and again I'm going to remove all of this up here I'm going to remove this I'm going to remove this and that gives me a good sense of the outline of the tree shape that I'm going to do there. Okay I'm going to do the same thing on the other side like that and that'll give me my whole pattern. I'm not going to shade in that as much you kind of get the idea these are the parts that I'm going to be removing. All right so now we're ready to start carving out the tree shape. To do that I'm going to work from the bottom to the top and cutting out these little shaded corners that I've identified. So I'm going to start with a stop cut on the bottom here and a little push cut up to it. It's going to start small like that and I'm just going to keep extending that more and more until I have cut that entire shaded triangle out of the bottom. Okay so it looks about like that. I keep working my way up and there is a reason that I'm starting from the bottom and working my way up. It is simpler because I'm cutting into a nice firm higher point up here. If I did this in the other direction it can be done but you're more likely to break your wood and I always think about this while I'm carving what's the order of the things that I'm going to do. If I cut this notch in the middle first and then I came down here to do this I would be cutting straight up into this piece that's out here. I'd be very liable to cut that off but if I start this way I'm always cutting into a more firm part up above from bottom to top. Now to get this top part I'm going to go ahead and draw another center line across the top kind of identifying where the top ridge of the tree is going to be there. I'm going to have to move this entire corner off of here. Now I will tell you that if I'm doing this and it goes quick and you feel like oh man how is he doing that so fast? How is his knife taking that off so fast? Is it the wood's really soft? Is it his knife's really sharp? The answer is both. The wood is soft. My knife is really sharp but I remember having soft wood and a sharp knife and still feeling like man I got to pause this video and take like 10 minutes to do a step like this and get that much wood off. Part of it is practice. You develop that hand strength, that sense of feeling over time, that muscle memory to be able to make those deep cuts and the strength in your hands to kind of control that. So if you've got to take a lot of steps to carve that off don't let that discourage you. It might take a little bit longer than it does for me there. There you go we got half of the tree cut out and we're going to do the other half of it now. Okay so on the other side we're going to do the same thing starting at the bottom and working our way up. Now I don't have much more to say about this than I have before so how about some Christmas tree jokes. What happens to Christmas trees on Valentine's Day? They get all sappy. All right there is the bottom part cut out there and working our way up here. Why are Christmas trees so sonde? Why are Christmas trees so fond of the past? Because presents are beneath them. You're welcome I'm here all day. All right now I want to talk a little bit about this. As I said before it might take you a few more cuts to do this. If I'm trying to get this flat I'm trying to flatten it from this line all the way to this line and I'm having trouble doing that in as few cuts of what I'm doing. What I would do is I would start cutting off a side like this and I would cut down to that pattern line that I put there and I might do that down here as well okay and that would just be gradually getting rid of that wood that I want to get rid of and then that's going to make it easier for me to come up the middle and do that. So I'm making a lot of cuts to do that it's not entirely flat right but by the time I'm getting towards the end I can make these nice large flat cuts and again that's why I'm like using a little bit of a bigger knife for this even though it's only a two inch piece of wood my knife blade is almost as long as the carving itself but I like using this big blade because it lets me take these big chunks off and even though I'm using a little piece of wood I really like the satisfaction of shaping the whole thing from start to finish myself. Alright so we actually have the general outline of the shape done really well there already and now what we're going to do is work on shaping the sides a little bit more. So the first thing we're going to do is taper the top and to do that I'm going to draw a center line on each side like this okay and I'm going to draw a pattern line that extends from the second tier of the branch all the way up like this and so this line is running parallel to the edge there and just extending from the second tier there. I'm going to do the same thing on this side like that okay and now to visualize this what I want to do is I want to remove everything between this line on the side and this line across the front make it completely flat between those two lines so I'm going to remove all of this I'm going to do this all part of one step okay so I'm going to start on this sharp ridge here and I'm just going to work on cutting this down and again take as many steps as you want to do this and you see it's starting to flatten out towards that center line on the side and that pattern line I drew across the front until I can get a completely flat all the way across there okay that's good now it looks a little lopsided but that's okay we're going to take care of that in the next step here by removing the same section on the other side right here and what's going to happen as I do this from this side is I'm going to get this ridge gradually pushed up until it goes straight up the middle of the tree and runs into my center line across the top there so again I'm flattening that out and if I do this evenly from both sides I will end up with a nice centered ridge across the top there still pulling to the side a little bit so I'm just going to shave that down until I get that where I want it just like that all right now I'm going to do the same thing on the other side exactly the same thing which means that it's probably time for another joke I already told you two jokes so it's time for joke number three and on to joke number four why did the Christmas tree go to the doctor it was looking a little green all right so I'm doing this on the other side meeting that nice ridge going up the center here okay and now that I've got that I'm just going to look at my top there make sure that I'm coming in on each side well until I've got that nice point at the top and every side is flat and this ridge in the middle is centered perfect all right now we're going to do a similar thing to add these facets on the sides but to do that we're not going up all the way across the top we're just going to be extending across the middle so what I'm going to do is I'm going to mark a point if I look at this horizontal line between or at the bottom of this first ridge of the tree I'm going to take this corner I'm going to go over about a third of the way across the wood and I'm just eyeballing that I think that's okay can be close enough about a third of the way across I'm going to put a little point there and what I'm going to do is extend that down that way and horizontally over here okay so that's going to look about like that I'll go ahead and do that for the section underneath like that okay and then if it's helpful I can add another center line on the sides like this I'm not necessarily going to get all the way to that center line but pretty close so what I'm going to do is very similar to what I did up here I want to make that similar cut here but it's be going into a stop cut at the base of this first part of the tree so I'm going to put a stop cut here on the corner straight into my wood there and then I'm going to start carving up into it like that I'm going to do that until I can pretty much flatten the area between that center line and that pattern line I just drew in across the front and you don't have to go very deep for that just a couple cuts and there we go okay so it makes a nice um tapered side there do the same thing right beneath it right like that very good cool and then I can do the same thing on the other side tapering in and on the bottom here as well and again I'm doing this in a pretty small number of cuts you might do this in a few but the key is that when you're done you want to make a really flat surface between those two lines okay cool all right same thing on the back side about a third of the way across the front here I'm going to mark that here and here I'll go ahead and draw that line in like that and like that I hope you see what I'm doing there same thing here and the same thing here so I'm going to make four more of those cuts going across the back of the tree here and while we do that I have a question for you why are Christmas trees bad at sewing because they are always dropping their needles yeah all right there's the left side done it is nice and clean and I'll quickly do the right side here now as I start to finish up here I will point out that you can see some of my pencil lines here you got a couple options here to get rid of your pencil lines my general preference is to carve my pencil lines off so I don't have to mess with an eraser so what I might do on something like this is just really lightly shave across the top and get rid of that pencil line if I've got that if you're not comfortable with that you can come back and erase it and that'll work pretty well that's fine but I kind of drew my lines a little sloppy because I was in a hurry you could take your time and do that all right so I'm very close to being done now I've got the general shape here and actually you could stop here it's an awesome little triangular geometric looking shape for a tree but I'm going to do one more step to just kind of finish this off I'm going to flare the sides so you can see the difference between this slant here and this one here what I've done is I've kind of flared the going in on each of these branches just adds a little bit more character I think and yeah just makes it look a little bit nicer but you could choose to leave it just like this if you want to so to do that what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down to the base of each section of the tree and I'm going to do a rolling push cut so I'm going to push in and roll up and my goal is to come in a little bit deep and then roll up until I come out right at the top and I'm trying to time it out so that I come out right at the tip like that so I've got a nice clean cut I heard I was pushing that a little bit hard you could hear the wood breaking a little bit I might want to do that in a couple cuts or really what I should have been doing is like I did on this cut a little bit further back on my blade where it's a little bit stronger and could handle that there you go a nice slope on both sides that one's a little more severe so when I look at that I'm just going to repeat this over here to kind of make it a little more symmetric perfect all right do the same thing on each of these but I'm just going into the stop cut so I'm just going to push in from the bottom roll up try to make those roughly equal until I've added some good interest on each of those sides and there we go all right so that's a great um just interesting more uh style I think to add the little slopes into the sides it's a great profile um that you get on that shape of the tree now there is one last excuse me there is one last thing that I'm going to do here which is really just to kind of smooth off the rough corners might be hard to see that on this one but um you just have these sharp edges and I feel like it looks a little better if we clean those up you can see the difference maybe between the one on the left with that sharp edge and the one on the right where I've kind of um smoothed that out a little bit so all I do for that is I take the the tip of my knife and just be careful not to hit the tip into the next tier and I just very gently do a cut like that where I'm just kind of taking that hard edge off the just like that I can do that on all three tiers even down to the bottom here the one on the bottom could be a little bigger that's fine when I do it this way I'm going to do it more as a paring cut coming back towards myself just be a little careful with that okay and you want to be careful not to go too deep with those but just a little bit I see I went too deep on that one and knocked the tip of my tree off that's okay just a shallow careful cut on there not pushing hard at all because I'm pulling it towards myself and yeah and then I'm going to do the same thing across that bottom on the front just like that and like that perfect all right and that's it that's done so there is my finished tree could be a pine tree could be a Christmas tree I'm recording this at Christmas time so I'm going to call it a Christmas tree some points for painting I just painted these green kind of slightly watered down green and I used the darker green you can use whatever shade you want and then I finished them with Howard's feed and wax for this one on the left that I decorated I used a embossing tool to put little dots on for those kind of cranberry strings or you could think of them as lights and then a very fine tip brush to do the snowflakes or star patterns whatever you want to envision that those are so have fun decorating those however you want that's it I hope you have fun carving those and try them you could do different sizes make them taller shorter wider whatever but it's just a fun simple project and could make for a great little display or ornament so thanks for watching and happy whittling