Woodcarving Techniques Explained For Beginners

Hey everybody, welcome. Thanks for tuning in. So in this one, I'm going to be talking about common carving strokes that every beginner should know how to do as they progress into the craft. The first one I'm going to be talking about is carving with the grain. So when I first started, I knew the premise of this one, like I understood it. It makes sense, but I felt like I was missing something and I wasn't, the information I was getting at the time, it wasn't really filling that void, if that makes sense. Basically I learned kind of as I went some of the different little elements of carving with the grain and it actually has a couple of different meanings that I'm going to explain to you guys here in this video. So the first meaning of carving with the grain is self-explanatory. You see the wood here, you see that the fibers or the grain is running in this direction, right? As the saying says, carve with the grain, so you're going to want to just carve in the direction of the grain, okay? So self-explanatory, okay? Just like that. So another element of carving with the grain I found that is if you look at the side of your piece of wood, you can see also the grain and it's running in a similar direction, but look at the orientation of it on the table. Is it going, is the grain going downhill or is it going uphill or what is the grain doing? Like let's say you're carving and it's just not carving as smooth as you would like, but you're carving with the grain, like what the heck? Okay, so another good thing to do is look at the side of your piece of wood and see where the grain is and if it's going downhill or uphill. So you want to carve downhill, basically with the grain, if that makes sense. So this, to me it looks like this grain on the side is very parallel, it's pretty level on the side, so it shouldn't technically matter, but you can see as I continue to carve this on this end, I'm creating a downhill effect here. So what I want to do is I want to keep carving in that direction if I can. Keep carving downhill. If I were to turn around and start going this way, you're going to find that your bevel is going to get caught like in the grain and it's going to start splitting or it's going to start tearing and it's just not going to work. You're going to probably get away with it if you have a sharp gouge, but you can see the difference and there's more resistance there. So one of the little hidden applications of carving with the grain is to carve downhill. Another element of carving with the grain is let's say you have a diagonal v-cut here, just like that. Another element of carving with the grain is to carve with the strength of the wood. So when you look at this diagonal v-cut here, the grain is obviously like this, going left and going right. You're going to have to decide which side of the v-gouge stroke you want to carve on. That's priority one. Once you figure that out, that will determine your stroke direction. So in this particular, let's say I'm going to do it on this side, you want to carve into the strength of the wood. So all the fibers are going this way. It's another element of carving downhill, you could say, but it's just kind of a different perspective. So I would be carving downhill. If I'm on this side, I'd be carving downhill because I'm carving into the strength of the grain. Just like that. If I were to do that on this side, I would get a lot more resistance and I would again start, my bevel would start gouging or cutting into, in between the grain fibers. And you're not, you're not going to want that. It's not going to be a clean cut. So then if I want to carve on this side, I'm going to have to change it up and I'm going to have to go the opposite direction. Just like that. And this portion, this element of carving with the grain, it can be very dynamic. You know, especially if you have a lot of curved, curved lines in a project and you're trying to carve with the grain, it's, it's very dynamic. You're going to have to kind of, you know, carve in the opposite direction that you were just carving. There's a lot of back and forth movement with that. Sometimes, like I said, you can get away with it if you have sharp gouges, but you're going to find, you're going to find resistance, even if you have sharp gouges. So the next one I'm going to talk about is your traditional stop cuts. And this is a super common one that every carver often hears about. And I often use it in my carving videos and I talk about it. So to do the stop cuts, it is a two stroke technique. And the goal is to get a vertical profile around a design. Basically you're, you're, you're doing your, your outline and you're getting that perfect vertical edge all the way around in order for you to properly shape it. And it's really important during this stop cut stage to get it as vertical as possible, because especially if you have thicker material or you got just a section that has a lot of, a lot of wood that you need shaping. Basically what happens is if you're not perfectly vertical, as you shape around that element in the design, it's going to cause the, it's going to cause that whatever you're shaping to get bigger or get smaller, depending on if you, it's slightly out, you know, it's not perfectly vertical or if you're slightly undercut, it's going to cause the, that element to shrink as you shape it. So it's not, it's not as crucial during shallow relief projects, just because it's thinner, you don't have that much material. But as you get into deeper projects, that vertical stop cut, getting that as straight down as you can is really important. Let's just give her a little wiggle here. Straighten off the end. Okay. So let's say this is my design. I'm trying to do that perfect vertical stop cut all the way around. What you do is you find, you find the gouge that matches the curvature of the outline, and then you plunge cut. That's another phrase is plunging. It's just straight down into the wood, right on the edge of that line. And then you're going to follow it up with a secondary stroke at a very shallow diagonal angle to chip out that section. I kind of made it a little harder on myself doing this kind of wiggly stuff, but I'll just go around the design. I'll do my plunge cut for my first stroke of my stop cut here. Go in. Okay, that's too shallow. So I'm gonna have to change it to my number seven here. Okay, we'll go back. You can just spin around, do a lot of back and forth, whatever, whatever works, whatever gouges you have. Okay. And then the second stroke is the shallow diagonal stroke to clean that up. And it can be tedious because when you do that secondary stroke, you don't know how deep your first cut was. So there's a lot of, you don't want to pry, right? Because you could end up prying off a chunk of wood that you don't want. I mean, you can get away with it a little bit, but when you're in there, you can feel how loose the piece of wood is. And if you can get away with prying or not, right? A lot of times I just kind of do that just to let me get a better visual of what I got going on here. But then I'll just come back. It's kind of best case scenario. If you can get away with both the, again, it's going to, you know, you might have to change it up as you're going in there, but if you can do the vertical and the secondary cut with one gouge, right? It just speeds it up a little bit. Go back to my number seven and get this in here. Yeah, just like that. You see how that, I made that nice and vertical all the way around this edge here. So then I can shape this, whatever I've got going on here, I can shape this design. You know, if I want to round it like this, I can do whatever I got to do, right? So the next carving stroke I'm going to talk about is called a tapering stroke. And I don't know if this is like a traditional, actual categorized stroke that carvers frequently use, or if this is just something that I just came up with. I don't hear people talk about tapering. People do it. Maybe they just have a different, different name for it. I don't know. But I call it tapering. And basically it's, oftentimes it's in conjunction with a stop cut. But, and it, and oftentimes you're talking about like a background or, or layers. It's very specific to layering and carvings. But you're basically, let's say you got that, that stop cut like this, you're basically tapering off the edge to give it just a nice gradual slope down to that base of that stop cut. And sometimes I'll refer to a taper as like an aggressive taper or like a really long gradual taper. And I'll kind of explain that and show you that here now. So I'll just create a scenario here. I guess I'll just use my peak gouge to be easier. When I refer to a taper in my videos, all I'm talking about is carving in the direction of the design or, or whatever you got going on in your project. And you're, you see this hard line right here. You're basically removing that and you're, you're, you're dropping, you know, this section of the wood down to meet the base of that, that stop cut or that, that big outstroke, whatever you got going on. You know, this is, this is good. And, and especially when we're talking about relief carving and layering, right? So oftentimes, you know, elements of a design layer into each other in order for different elements to pop out or, or, you know, you want the grass, you know, overhanging the rock or, or, you know, you want the posts, you know, what I'm referring to my, my, my flower solo bloom carving, you want that post, you know, disappearing behind the grass and, you know, just so different things like that. And that's where the tapering comes in. So all I'm doing is I'm just giving it a taper in here to get rid of that hard line that was created by the V gouge. And I would consider this more of an aggressive taper. Like it's not very long and shallow. It's just pretty precise, just getting rid of the, getting rid of that line. But it's, you know, it's pretty, pretty short. Like oftentimes, you know, an aggressive taper is nice if you're doing kind of like a, a unique border around a specific carving, you know, like in my, my maple leaf carving or the pumpkin carving, you know, nice just to get rid of that hard line. But it allows, it still allows the object to kind of pop from the background, if that makes sense. You know, a tapering, it's very specific to, to the scene and what you're carving. So like I said, this would be a good gradual, or this would be a good aggressive taper. A gradual taper is lengthening that quite a bit more, you know, up to, out to here or wherever, you know, and that takes quite a bit of extra time. And again, you have to make sure that you're, you're tapering fairly evenly, you know, but oftentimes I'll just work my way back to that line. Oftentimes, you know, where a long gradual taper would come into play is like a sky layer. Like if you got some trees, like some distant trees in the sky, you can then taper, do a really long gradual taper with the sky layer and, you know, vanish it back behind the trees just to give it that, that separation. So this is, would be a good example of a long gradual taper. So this next one is probably the most important carving stroke in a wood carver's arsenal, but it's oftentimes, I find probably the one that's most overlooked or one that people just don't really want to do because it takes so much extra time, but that is the undercut. And what I find that's so important about an undercut is it separates those layers and it makes objects, you know, stand out from the layer that's beneath it. So if you got a flower or something like that, you know, you can undercut those petals and allow that flower to stand out from the background or whatever, whatever's behind it. And it just, it looks like it's just kind of floating there. You know, I find that, that undercutting, I mean, this to me is kind of what separates besides the fact that, you know, we're, we're human and we carve, you know, with our hands and stuff like that. This is kind of what separates us from a CNC machine because a CNC machine cannot do undercutting, like, unless it's, unless it's some fancy, crazy, fancy, super expensive machine that maybe, maybe it could pivot diagonally and get in and around there. But to me, this cut is so important because this is what can separate a carving from a CNC replica. Okay. Basically what you're doing again is you got that, you got that vertical, vertical stop cut that you just created. And you're coming in with your gouge at a diagonal angle, right? You're removing the wood that's underneath that specific object, right? Taking the wood out, out from under there. So it's basically a stop cut, but at a far more aggressive angle, getting underneath the object. Okay. And I can kind of use these two elements here that I just carved as a good example. Sometimes you can get this undercutting done with a V gouge that's also similar to a stop cut. You know, you can get, like, I can just do this an example. You can use your V gouge and have, I guess, whatever side of the V gouge is going to be carving along the design. You can tilt it up to where that's vertical. It's just kind of a little shortcut, I guess. And you can get that stop cut done with just a V gouge like this. Okay. But you can also do it to do your undercut. And it's basically the same thing, but opposite. You have your one side of the V gouge, I guess, closer to the background or the lower layer. And then you're just kind of scooping out underneath that design. And you can usually only do this if you've got, like, long straight sections that you can get in there with a V gouge. Otherwise, you're going to have to do, like, a traditional way. But that's a good example of kind of a shortcut, stop cut, or I'm sorry, undercut with your V gouge. You see how that's going underneath the design, allowing the two layers to be separate from each other? Now this, kind of do the same thing. But I got to go, you know, at a pretty aggressive angle, probably, you know, 45 degrees. You can see if you got a pretty intricate design, you know, with a lot of rotation and movement, you can see how this would take quite a bit of extra time, especially if you're doing some deep relief stuff where, you know, you got to remove an inch or more of material that can take quite a bit of time. But I find that it's worth it. Just like that, you can see, again, similar to this one, you can see that I removed that wood underneath the design, allowing the two layers to be separate from each other. Okay, so another carving stroke. I don't necessarily talk about it a whole lot. I probably implement it into some of my carvings, and I don't even really think about it. But that's just a simple chip cut. I don't do chip carving personally. But like I said, there's probably some elements in the carving itself that you could consider it a chip carve, but I just, I don't think of it that way. But basically, you got a flat plane piece of wood, and oftentimes it's with a knife, like, especially with a traditional chip carver. But it can be done with gouges as well. But basically, you're making two or more strokes, cuts into the wood, into a flat plane piece of wood. And in the end, a little chip is going to pop out, right? It's going to be, it's going to leave a impression in the wood, whatever you, however you cut it out. So I got my skew here. To me, the most simplistic way of explaining the chip cut, you could do it very simply. And that is just a two stroke down like that, and then down like that. To me, that's a chip cut, right? Actual chip carvers that do this consistently, you know, they're doing, you know, curves and rotations and, and multiple, multiple cuts into the wood to pop out a very intricate, you know, chip. I don't, that's, that's not me, but I'm just kind of explaining it, right? So you could, you know, or, or you could do the, you kind of have to visualize the point of your, of your bevel, right? There's a, that's a three point chip. Again, it's not my cup of tea. I probably do this at times in my carvings, and I just don't really think of it as a chip cut. So a couple other carving strokes that are good to know. They're not like as greatly classified, in my opinion, as these, but they're just good to, to know the lingo of, in case you're just starting out and you're, you're watching one of my videos, you're watching somebody else's videos and they, and they refer to it. But another one would be, I had already talked about it earlier, but it's just the plunge, the plunge cut. And that, you know, you're just going, you're just going straight down into the piece of wood, right? You could even, you know, oftentimes I do it with, you know, texturing where I'll, I'll kind of plunge at an angle and then I'll kind of chip out, right? You can kind of get away with that. So you could kind of refer to that as, as a, as a plunge cut, just with a twist. So another one would be cross cutting. And that is when you got your grain going in a particular direction, you're cutting perpendicular to that. So in this case, I would be carving in that direction. Okay. And cross cutting is super important to have sharp gouges because you're going to tell if it's not, you're going to get pushing of the grain. Those are, that's, that's a sharp gouge right there. If it's not sharp, you're going to notice little, I call them like micro gaps in the grain that would indicate pushing of the grain. That would mean you need to sharpen your gouge. A good technique I find when you're doing cross cutting is to carve with a sweeping motion as you're doing your stroke that encourages cutting, not pushing, right? Like that. Or if you have, let's say more of a shallower gouge, you can hold the gouge at an angle, almost a 45 degree. You'll see this on some of my videos, but that also encourages pushing or not. I'm sorry. That encourages cutting of the grain just like that instead of pushing. Satisfying. I think I explained most of the basic carving strokes that you're going to frequently run into as a new carver. If you have a question about one, if you have one, or maybe it is referred to in a different way, don't hesitate to reach out. You can, you can comment below if you have any questions, or you can also email me. If also, if you have a question on a particular carving that you're working on, you don't really know how to address a particular area in the carving, you feel free to email me. Some people have done that and I will do my best to, I guess, explain to you my thoughts on what I'm seeing. Hopefully I covered all of them. If I didn't, make sure you let me know and I'll try to address it maybe in another video, but I appreciate everybody watching up to this point and I'll see you in the next one.