Alexander Grabovetskiy, woodcarver, School of Woodcarving · Published 2023
What is a skew chisel used for in wood carving?
Quick answer: A skew chisel is a woodcarving tool whose edge sits at an angle to the shank rather than at ninety degrees. Because of that angle the tool shears the wood as it travels forward, which leaves a clean surface and lets the corner of the edge work into places a square end blocks.
A skew is a carving tool with its edge ground on a slant instead of square across the blade. The slant makes it slice while you push, so the fibers part rather than crush. On a relief panel it also gets an edge into a corner that a square end cannot enter at all.
Have you ever pushed a gouge and felt it crush the wood ahead of the edge instead of parting it? Does your own relief look busy up close and flat from the doorway? Workshops 50 through 61 are the stretch where I stopped chasing detail and went after darkness.
I love skews. Several of the ones on my bench were never sold to me that way, either. Mine began as a gouge near enough a number 7, and I put a long bevel on it and ground the edge over on a slant. That one tool now goes places nothing straight in the rack will follow.
What decides whether a panel reads from across the room
- Shadow decides it, not detail. A rim with air behind it goes black, and the eye finds black from twenty feet away.
- Grind an edge over on a slant and a push becomes a slice.
- You can grind one yourself out of a number 7, and a student of mine did exactly that after watching these workshops.
- German carvers used skew gouges in the 15th century. English church carvers did not.
- Much of what I carve in this stretch nobody will ever see, because it lives inside a hole.
- My work lamp lies about shadow, and switching it off is the only honest test I have on the bench.
What does a skew do that a square edge cannot?
Reach sideways into a corner, and slice while you push straight ahead. Watch a sharp tool go through basswood and you will see you are not chopping anything. You are making slices. One after another, and the surface a slice leaves behind is better than anything sandpaper will give you, and I do not have to sand these leaves at all.
A square end makes you swing the handle to find that slicing action. On the skew the cut already sits at an angle, so a plain forward push does the work for you. Small change to a tool, large change to the day.
That skewed 7 came from Henry Taylor as an ordinary gouge, and I love this particular line of theirs. The tool is light, and the walls of it are really thin. On soft wood, lime wood or basswood, thin walls are a gift. Put a thin tool like that into harder wood and you can break it easily, so know which is on your bench.
Where do you get a skew gouge if nobody sells one?
Gary ground his own out of a number 7. He teaches design at a university, he had been following these workshops, and he watched me reach for a skew often enough that he decided to make one. Easy to do, and I mean that. All you are doing is taking an edge off square, and the longer bevel comes with time on a stone. I have even done it to a back bend or two. Odd looking thing to have in a rack, right up until the afternoon you need one.
If sharpening is the part that worries you, that is the honest place to start, and there is a whole course here on the edge itself. Grinding a skew is a sharpening job before it is a carving job.
Why did German carvers use skews when the English did not?
Look at the English work of the 1600s, the century of Grinling Gibbons, and you will not find these tools. Skew chisels turn up now and then, but I have never once found a skew gouge in that work. Then go and stand in front of German work from the 15th century, the world Riemenschneider came out of, and the marks are all over it.
Blame Gothic ornament. In that world you spend your life joining one cut to the next, and two skews worked from opposite directions meet each other clean. Two square edges are nowhere near so obliging. Somebody figured that out five hundred years ago in a German shop, and it never crossed the water.
What is a skew veiner?
A number 11 with the same slant ground onto it. I catch myself calling the thing a skew gouge, then a skew chisel, and it is neither of those. Scooping out the last of the waste is what it is for, and it leaves a clean transition on the inside of a curve. The name veiner, by the way, comes from the veins it puts on your project.
Why does a carving need shadow more than it needs detail?
Shadow is the frame. Think about a piece of fine art and the frame around it, and how the frame is the thing that separates the picture from the wall it hangs on. On a carved panel the deep excavation does that same job. That darkness goes right around the big idea. Take it away from a composition this size and the whole thing looks bad, and I do mean bad rather than merely quiet.
Wood carving is pretty much all about shadows and lights. Painters have a word for that, chiaroscuro, and they were working on it centuries before anybody filmed a workshop. We get to do it with steel and a mallet instead of a brush, and the light in the room does half the work for free.
Much the same reasoning explains why the tips on Venetian ornament behave the way they do, and why the earlier workshops on this room spend so long on the head of a single leaf. The leaf is not the point. What matters is the shadow it drops.
How deep do you go when nobody will ever look inside?
Deeper than seems reasonable, and I will defend it. Every side cut runs into the same hole, and once the panel is on a ceiling that hole is invisible to the human eye. Nobody is going to lie on the floor and peer into a slot that narrow. The slot is what throws the shadow though, and the shadow is the whole of what a person standing below actually sees.
Not without a limit, though. In a tight spot I keep about 5 mm (3/16 in) of thickness under my thumb, because thinner than that and the piece turns fragile, and a weak carving is a problem with no cure. Dig deep where deep buys you darkness. Leave the wood where it does not.
Sometimes the digging runs down into the glue line from the original blank, and then I have to work around a line of glue in the middle of a soft hollow. The way the board was glued up in Part 1 comes back to visit me in Part 5, which is the sort of thing you only learn by staying on one panel long enough.
Which tool digs which kind of shadow?
Four tools do most of it here, and each one earns its place for a different reason. The number 9 bores holes. Rolling and outlining fall to the number 11, a skew gets into the corners, and the fishtail carries a wide edge on a neck narrow enough to turn a full circle inside a pocket without ever touching them.
| Tool in hand | What it does that others will not | Its maker | Where it goes on this panel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Number 9 gouge | Rotates fully in place and lifts a plug out | Ashley Iles | The deepest holes, driven with a mallet |
| Skewed number 7 | Slices cleanly on a straight push | Henry Taylor | Tight corners between two close pipes |
| The fishtail number 7 | Carries a wide edge on an unusually narrow neck | Auriou, 14 mm | Deep pockets where every other shank fouls |
| Number 11 veiner | Two tools in one, straight or leaned over | Pfeil, Swiss made | Every outline and the acanthus eye |
The Ashley Iles number 9 in 10 mm (3/8 in) is the one I put a mallet behind. Any number 8 or number 9 will do that job, so do not go shopping on my account. One of my Auriou tools is a 14 mm (9/16 in) number 7 fishtail. Another fishtail on the rack has been sharpened so many times it is shorter than the day it arrived, and I use that one a lot. If you want the full rack and what each shape is for, that lives in its own course.
How does a plug cut make a black hole in a leaf?
Set the gouge down pointing downhill, then turn it. That rotation lifts a plug of wood out whole, and a row of plugs side by side opens a slot with vertical walls. About an eighth of an inch, 3 mm, comes away at a bite. Step down to a 6 mm (1/4 in) number 9, then to a 3 mm one, and a 1 mm tool exists for the last of it when a spot is mean enough to need it.
A veiner will not do this. Its walls run too near parallel before they turn, so it channels beautifully and refuses to rotate. Whole difference between the two families, in one sentence, and it took me years to say it that plainly.
What happens when the shadow comes out wrong?
Happens more than I would like, and I do not always know why. In workshop 59 I had a curved cut casting a straight shadow, and a straight shadow along a rolling leaf looks wrong to my eye. I went at it with a 14 mm (9/16 in) number 7 to pull a stronger arc through the hollow. Better, I think. Then I stood back and decided it was probably just my light, the way the lamp throws across the board from one side, and I left it alone.
It is what it is. You do not have to agree with me, and plenty of carvers would have kept going.
Does your work lamp tell you the truth about a shadow?
Mine does not, and I have stopped trusting it. My lamp sits on my right and it fills in half of what I have just dug, so a hollow that will read black on a ceiling looks shallow and pointless on the bench. Switch the lamp off and the same cut goes deep and dark and obvious. Costs nothing, that test, and I run it all day long.
A panel has to work in any environment. Not in the one pool of light it was carved under, but in whatever light the room turns out to have, at four in the afternoon in November as well as at noon in June.
Do you have to carve with the grain on a relief panel?
Not always, and this is where people get stuck. Once wood arches over your cut there is exactly one direction left to come from, and often that direction runs against the grain. I go anyway. With a genuinely sharp edge I am fine going against it, and if the edge is not sharp then the grain was never the problem.
The other half of the answer is the shape of the tool. More often than you would guess I hold the gouge upside down, slicing one way and then flipping over to come back the other, and the techniques course shows that grip properly.
How do you carve something that has to look like it is flying?
You cheat a little, then you hide where you cheated. A leaf that appears to float still needs a stem of material holding it to the board somewhere, so the job is to put that support where the eye will not go looking. Open space behind the rim, plus a shadow underneath, will convince anybody. The support is real and the flight is a trick, and both things are true at once.
Rounding a form over into that kind of motion is what I call making it roundy. If curly can come from curl, then roundy can come from round, and I have said it on almost every project I have ever filmed.
What do workshops 50 through 61 actually cover?
Twelve workshops and 142 filmed parts, on one panel headed for a ceiling. This stretch picks the board up where Part 4 left it and carries the acanthus on through another long run of leaves. Nothing here was made for the camera. Everything is filmed in order, mistakes included, and when I blow the chips out with a hair dryer you see that too.
Some of my work I cannot film at all, because certain customers will not have the inside of their home shown. This panel I can film, with restrictions. I am not going to show you the whole picture with it installed, because it goes overseas to another country, and I will fly out and watch the installation. The name of the customer stays with me too. What I will tell you is that the house sits on a mountain, and land on that mountain is the most expensive in the whole world. That is the only clue you are getting.
By the end of workshop 61 more of that framework of shadow is in place. Leaves that were only shapes have become edges with air behind them, and several of the acanthus eyes are carved. Then it goes up on a ceiling, where all of this stops being theory.
Related ground, if you want the shorter road in first: the Greek acanthus leaf is a single leaf, and acanthus over moldings puts one over a molding. Both are smaller jobs than a ceiling.
Who is this stretch of the Venice Room for?
A carver who has already carved a leaf and is tired of it lying flat. You need to be comfortable with a gouge and a mallet, you need tools that hold an edge, and you need real limewood or basswood rather than a piece of construction lumber. Carve a 2x4 and you will get so frustrated and kill your tools.
I am going to be honest with you about the rest. This is slow work. Twelve workshops is months, not a weekend, and if money is your biggest problem right now then a pencil and a piece of paper cost nothing and design is where I would send you first anyway. You have to be real about which of those two you are.
Does a leaf that genuinely lifts off its board interest you more than another finished ornament? Would you rather know why the old work looks like that? Then the whole school is one door, and this room is one of the courses behind it. Shall we carve?
If you would rather look around before deciding anything, the map of every lesson is open, the story of the school is on one page, and the in person classes in Maine are there for people who want a bench next to mine. Start here if you have never carved anything.
One more thing, and it is the smallest thing on this page. On the panel there is a hole I carved during a livestream, off to one side. It outlines the main movement, and visually it is just really nice.
How it's done
- Mark the line, then stay off it. Draw the division, then outline a good eighth of an inch, 3 mm, clear of the pencil. Going back to a line you have already carved through is not an option.
- Relieve the shape with a veiner. A 4 mm number 11 opens the outline and frees the waste beside it. Two relief cuts, one either side of a division, are enough to begin.
- Drive the first plug straight down. Stand a 10 mm number 9 upright, tap it once with a mallet, then rotate. Wood leaves as a plug and the wall behind it comes out vertical.
- Step the tools down toward one hole. Follow with 6 mm, then 3 mm, aiming every pass at the same opening. A 1 mm number 9 finishes a spot too mean for anything wider.
- Lean the veiner over to raise a ridge. Rolled onto its side, a 10 mm number 11 bites deep on one wall and shallow on the other. The high wall starts throwing its own shadow immediately.
- Reach the corner that blocks a straight shank. Where an ordinary tool fouls, a number 7 ground on the skew, or a short fishtail on a slim neck, turns inside the pocket without bruising its walls.
- Blow it clear, then kill the lamp. Chips fill a hollow and hide the work. A hair dryer empties it, and switching the bench light off shows the darkness a room will actually see.
Frequently asked questions
How does a skew chisel differ from a skew gouge?
Flat against curved. The two names get muddled constantly, even by me. Put a straight edge on an angle and you have the chisel. Grind that same angle across a hollow sweep and you have the gouge, and a number 11 treated that way becomes a skew veiner.
Can a carver regrind a normal gouge into a skew?
Plenty of people do, mine included. Taking an edge off square on a stone is ordinary sharpening work, and a longer bevel follows with practice. Gary, who teaches design at a university, built his own from a number 7 after seeing how often I picked mine up.
Why is a number 11 called a veiner?
From the veins it leaves behind in the work. The tool is a deep letter U with near parallel walls, so one pass along a leaf reads as a vein. Sweeps such as 8 and 9 are true half rounds, which is why those rotate and a veiner never will.
What to carve next