Woodcarving Techniques, Tips, and Tricks, Q and A

Wood carving technique starts before the gouge ever touches the wood, while you are still looking at the board. You look at the grain and decide which way to attack. You take the biggest tool the shape will hold. Then you slice instead of shoving, and when the wood tears anyway, you stop and sharpen.

Ever dig at one spot for an hour and get nowhere? A channel comes off glassy on one wall and shreds on the other, and you sit there wondering what you did wrong. I see both in my classes.

What decides whether the wood fights you

• Grab the widest gouge the shape allows, and go small only for the last details.
• Short grain to long grain works on an outside curve, and stops working on an inside curve.
• A sharp edge beats every grain trick ever written.
• Slice by rotating the tool through the pass instead of pushing it straight ahead.
• Sandpaper is fine under gold leaf. Skip it when you want the tool marks.
• Punch a background with a ground down nail when a $45 punch set is not in the budget.
• Stabilize thin petals with thin super glue, then lay the piece on acoustic foam before you carve the back.

Which gouge should you pick up first?

Pick the biggest one the shape will hold. I watch carvers take a quarter inch tool to a whole panel and dig, and dig, and dig, and they spend so much time on it that they get frustrated. My big gouge measures 80 mm across, three inches and one eighth, and it knocks the mass off a project in one day.

Here is how I put it in class. Flying from Florida to Maine took me five and a half hours. Driving would have run about thirty. The Appalachian Trail takes months on foot, and people really walk it. All three get you there. A big gouge is the airplane, a 20 mm is the drive, and a small tool is the hike.

Big first, then medium, and the small ones only for details. Starting small is one of the biggest mistakes I see, even from people who have carved for years.

I look at my tools as an army. Every gouge is a soldier with one job, and the bigger the army the bigger the ground you can take. Two tools will carve, but two tools will hold you to small work. I am the general.

Why does one side of a channel shred?

Fibers on that side have nothing underneath holding them up. Draw a donut on a board. Short grain sits at the top and bottom of that ring, long grain runs along the sides, and you begin where the fibers are short and finish into the long ones.

The other way to see it is support. Take a bundle of drinking straws and rub your hand along them. One way is easy. The other is like petting a dog against the grain. Under the face of a board the longer fibers below hold up the shorter ones above, and a pass that runs against that support lifts the fibers and fights you.

Inside a bowl the grain changes direction as you carve, so you have to attack it from the opposite side. Somewhere there is a spot where the two directions meet. We call it the marriage line. Carve through it and the wood splits, so you work in from both sides and meet there.

Then comes the honest answer. Carve in the Grinling Gibbons style and there is no such thing as carving with the grain. You have to attack the wood from different angles. Sharp tools. That is the whole solution, and it is why sharpening sits second in the three things I teach.

How should you hold the gouge?

Two hands, and the second one decides how clean the pass comes off. You can swap hands when the carving turns a corner, and plenty of carvers do, myself included. There is another way that saves the swap. Keep the same hand on the handle and rotate the tool instead, which is a really fun trick, and you can practice it. Whichever you pick, move your second hand closer to the blade. The nearer that hand sits to the edge, the more control you have, and the cleaner the surface it leaves.

What does a carver mean by a slicing pass?

Rotating the tool through the pass instead of shoving it forward. Watch my wrist on any finishing pass and it turns while the edge travels. You can push too, before the refining starts. At the finish it changes, because every surface you leave has to be clean straight off the tool, and true masters never reached for paper to fix it.

Do you need sandpaper on a carving?

Sandpaper depends on the finish, and on how that finish goes on. I am carving a shade for a pipe organ in New York City right now, mid German Baroque, pierced so about half the panel is holes. All of it goes under water gilded gold leaf. Gold needs a stabilized, shiny ground, so that one gets sanded.

Old shops had none and still got there. In England they used reed rush, the same stuff sold in music shops, and it works out to roughly 400 grit. Gibbons used it. Other carvers reached for shark skin. Fifteenth century men took a shard of glass and scraped.

Scraping still works, and I do it with a carving knife across the whole surface. After that you burnish with a chip of the same species, basswood on basswood, and it comes up shiny with no metal burnisher anywhere near it. For gold I finish with 4,000 grit Mirka mesh. The mesh lets dust fall through instead of pressing abrasive down into the wood.

Under a tool finish, leave the paper in the drawer. Every pass has to come off clean, which is the whole point of learning to use the tools properly.

What is the difference between a straight gouge, a fishtail and a longy?

All three carve the same sweep. The shank decides where you can put the edge, and that is really the whole story.

Shape of shank	Where it earns its keep at work	Weak spot
Straight gouge with a long groove	Lasts a lifetime	Will not turn once inside a hole
The fishtail	Drops in, rotates, carves all around	Only a short groove
Longy with a shank that tapers back	Gets inside a hole	Cannot rotate in a tight pocket
Reshaped V tool	Wings ground back to clear an undercut	A straight one still does a wall that is not undercut

My deep excavation is nearly all fishtail. A number 9 at 6 mm drops into a hole, turns, and carves the whole inside wall, which no straight tool of mine will do. I also use just the corner of a fishtail to reach tiny spots a straight tool cannot. A number 7 fishtail at 14 mm does the same job one size up.

How deep are you supposed to go?

I see it first, and in my lessons I say the number out loud. Six millimetres, a quarter inch, and I give both because my students are in more countries than I have ever counted. Reading depth by eye is grown, not inherited. Think of learning cursive between two ruled lines, and how after a while you stopped needing the lines at all. Carving in three dimensions goes the same way. The more you dig the more you see, and one piece of mine goes about eight inches deep.

Can you punch a background without buying a punch set?

Grind a nail. A framing nail, the thickest you can find, flattened on the end and then filed with a triangle file until it carries a pattern. I have done that a lot, and the nail gives you more freedom in the pattern than a bought set does.

The bought sets are good as well. Woodcarvers Supply sells a set of five, three round, one square, one rectangle, for about $40 to $45, and mine matched the original piece exactly. My main one is 5 mm, so 3/16, and the little rectangle runs 3 by 10 mm.

For the bubbly ground on those antique rosettes I use leather punches. Search for background punches for leather and you land on exactly the tool, in three sizes, matching the original carving. Google background tools for wood carving and you find nothing at all.

Fifteen minutes of punching separates a design from its ground. Stain then sits darker in the punched area, so a shallow furniture panel suddenly reads deep.

What keeps a thin petal from snapping while you carve behind it?

Glue in the fibers first, then something soft underneath. Undercutting is what casts the shadow, and carving really is all about light and shadow, so the back has to be reachable.

Three ways to stiffen the wood, and the finish picks which one. Wood glue thinned half and half with water soaks in and hardens the fibers, and you will not be able to stain it nicely later. Thin super glue penetrates beautifully, though by my reckoning it holds for about five years. Wood hardener, the stuff sold for rotten exterior wood, takes two or three coats and still lets you stain. Later, on the Tray of Blessing, I used penetrating epoxy instead, and there I said a hardener is not really going to do anything.

Now the flip. Bench cookies will not save you, because you still press down and the petals go. I lay the piece on ribbed acoustic studio foam, the sort people hang on a wall to kill echo, and it takes the pressure without breaking anything. Small tools only from the back, a 5 mm Dockyard rather than something with real force behind it.

That piece is one panel of a whole Venetian room. If something breaks anyway, I glue it back from a small bottle and keep working.

What holds the work while you carve it?

A clamp dropped into a bench hole, and often nothing more. My bench top is drilled on a grid, so a Festool clamp goes into a hole and locks really quickly, and I move round the piece as the carving moves. The same system works as stop blocks. Drop them into the holes wherever the piece sits, push it up against them and carve with nothing locked down at all. They take the shape really easily, and I can work at whatever angle I need.

Does a traditional carver use an iPad?

Lately, this one does, and an Android pad will work too. I draw the extra details a client asks for in Procreate, on a canvas set to real inches at 400 dpi, with the peppermint pencil.

Ten years back a client wanted an acanthus leaf moved higher on a ten foot headboard drawing. I took a razor to the paper, erased hours of work, and redrew the whole thing. He rang back and asked to shift it right. We call that the dancing stage, and on paper it is a waste of time.

The drawing goes into SketchUp next, so I can scale it to the millimeter, which matters when a finished carving has to land on a wall. Then a PDF, then the print shop. One sheet 36 inches by 120 inches cost me $27, so I never did buy the plotter I kept thinking about.

Carbon paper moves it onto the board and the jigsaw takes the waste off. Design comes first of the three things I teach. Nowadays you can skip it and print a pattern off the internet, but I built a whole course on design.

The one habit worth stealing from this course

Stop overcomplicating. That was the first thing my teacher taught me about sharpening. He told me not to spend money on stones until I had money to spend, and to lay sandpaper on a flat bench instead.

I still do it. For the inside of a tiny gouge I buy 6,000 grit automotive paper at Home Depot. I keep sandpaper in the kitchen, put it on the countertop, and my wife always has the sharpest knives. In prison I carved furniture with a 10 mm knife I made myself and a small gouge ground out of a nail, and they paid me one boiled potato a day. One potato.

Thirty five years later I still tell students a ground nail makes a good background punch, which it does. If you want somebody to stand at your shoulder while you learn this, that is what we do inside the school.

Shall we carve?