Beginner in Woodcarving Workshop 1

One knife, a block of basswood and a clamp. That is the entire shopping list for a first lesson, and the knife is the one item I tell you not to buy cheap. My own master gave me one knife to start with, kept teaching me with it for a long time, and only after that came the gouge.

You don't need a rack of tools or a workshop for this lesson, though you can see I have both. What exists is a kitchen table, a clamped board and three cuts, repeated until your hands stop guessing how deep they have gone.

Let me say the hard thing first. I once heard the question, what is the richest place on this planet? People said the USA, or Israel. That's wrong. It is a cemetery, and it is rich because of talent that went into the ground unused.

Plenty of people lying there had a talent God gave them and never used it. I don't want you to be one of them. Whether you get results is genuinely up to you, and nobody else can want it on your behalf.

Key takeaways

• A single blade covers the whole first lesson.
• Buy the good one. Cheap steel is unstable and snaps under ordinary pressure, though even a good knife can break.
• Basswood, which Europe knows as lime.
• A kitchen table is a perfectly good bench when no mallet is involved, which is exactly the case with knife work.
• The knife works in three angles: straight, right, left.
• The exercise trains how deep you travel with your knife, and the feel for what angle to hold it at.

What does a beginner actually have to buy?

A knife, and my recommendation is a number 12, Swiss made, of the kind sold for chip carving. Not cheap. Worth every penny of it.

Chip carving proper is a related discipline rather than the same one. Similar, genuinely different, and the knife sold under that name is my favorite for what I teach here.

Mine has sat on my shelf for twenty years and still goes into my hand most working days. One purchase, one lifetime friend, and I mean that in a fairly literal way.

That knife paid my bills. Housing, food, clothes, every one of them came out of work done with a single blade, and I am not speaking about small sums here.

Why one knife and not a set?

My master worked that way, and the method holds up. All he gave me was my first knife. He taught me for a long time to use that knife in all of my carvings, and only then did he give me a gouge. This course goes the same way: the knife comes first, and your gouge comes after.

Behind me on the wall hangs a great many tools. A beginner needs none of them yet, and you don't have to own all those tools to get great results.

Believe me when I say a single blade covers an enormous amount of ground. For the beginning, one knife is enough, and it's going to last you a long time.

Some call the one blade approach Viking style, because the old Viking boats people found carry nicely carved designs, most of them done with just a knife and a hand. That name is not really accurate and I use it loosely, since carving with a single knife predates any Viking by a considerable margin.

People carved this way for a very long time. Work from the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries survives, made by hands that owned a knife and very little else besides.

Picture yourself four thousand years ago with no other tool. A knife is what you have. Keep that in mind on the molding later, where I draw the lines by hand with no tools, and if one comes out a little off, that's fine.

Is the cheap knife ever worth it?

Rarely, and here is what you are buying instead. Cheap versions sacrifice the steel, which means the metal is unstable and the blade snaps far more easily than it should.

Mine can break too. It breaks easily enough, so nothing I say here is an argument that expensive tools are unbreakable.

A cheaper one probably won't last you as long, either. I can't speak for every brand out there, but I would buy a really good tool from the beginning.

What wood should a beginner buy?

Basswood, without hesitation. Soft enough for an inexperienced hand, hard enough to keep hold of the detail you carve into it, and I'd call it one of the best.

Europe calls the same tree lime or linden, England says lime timber, and where I grew up in Russia everybody calls it lipa. Some cultures know it as the tea tree, since linden flowers brew beautifully.

Almost no figure shows in it. Grain is there, of course, though barely visible, and you can still achieve great results in it.

Woodcraft stocks it, and craft shops like Michaels carry basswood planks. For this lesson I just use what was left over from another project.

One more thing about buying the knife. That knife is available in most countries, and you probably have access to Amazon too.

Do you need a workshop?

Not for this. Knife work involves no mallet and no heavy movement, so the surface underneath hardly matters, and I have finished whole projects on a kitchen table.

You do need some kind of clamp, though. Fix the board down before you touch it with a blade, and fasten it again when you flip the piece over, as I do on the molding.

Mine is a simple clamping arrangement, nothing clever about it at all. Pencil, knife, clamp, board, and there is your bench.

What are the three angles?

Straight, then right, then left. Pretty much every cut with this knife is one of those three, and the exercise is three pencil lines drawn across a board so you can practise all of them.

Draw those lines across the grain if you can. Then take your knife, and the first cut on each line goes straight down, 90 degrees.

Grain direction comes up later, in workshop two. Right now it is enough to know which way it runs and to draw accordingly.

How do you hold the knife?

Locked in the palm for the straight cut. Grip it tight, genuinely tight, put the blade on your pencil mark and pull the whole thing squarely toward your body.

Make sure the blade faces your body. Do all three straight cuts the same way before any angled cut comes in.

A second grip turns up when the shape gets small. Hold it exactly as you hold a pencil. I hold it that way on the leaves, because they are tiny.

Where does the angled cut begin?

Roughly five millimetres clear of the line, or three sixteenths if you think in inches. Precision is unnecessary here. Approximately is fine, and that spot is your arch point. Then move the knife over to the right for the angled cut, and make sure you feel it.

Watch my finger while that cut runs. I support the knife with it, so the cut stays accurate and comes out with a nice arch.

What if the chip will not lift out?

Go back and repeat the straight cut. When you lean the knife over, you have to feel where the end of that straight cut is inside the wood.

Do that, and you should have the same clean result. If I have to go back to clean one, I just go back and clean it.

Look at what comes out. On the third line the cuts come from both sides to the center, and they should sit in exactly the same position.

What is this exercise really training?

Depth. You travel the same depth on this side and on that side, and every one of these cuts trains your hand to feel how far down the blade has gone.

Feel is the word I keep using in this workshop. You are building a sense of how deep to travel and what angle to hold, and if you only watch me and never work on it, you are not going to get results.

Draw a stem freehand, put a few leaves on it, cut the right side of each one and then the left. With the leaves done, there is something on that board you can honestly call carving.

A man interested in the school once emailed to ask what level he would reach in one month, in two months, in a year. That's impossible to tell. It all depends on you, and on how you work toward your goal.

When does the knife get turned round?

For the molding exercise at the end. Point away from the body this time, because it is a different technique and you have to carve differently.

Take a strip about twenty millimetres wide and ten thick. Three quarters of an inch by three eighths, near enough, and nobody is measuring you.

Step off equal spaces down its length, drop a straight cut at ninety degrees on every line, then run a diagonal corner to corner. Skew the knife down along that diagonal, and you should be maybe two millimetres deep.

Flip the strip and repeat from the other direction. By the end there is a heap of chips on the table and a length of molding that turns a plain edge into something worth looking at. You can use it around a frame, or anywhere you like.

Look at the finished piece in different light and watch what happens. Shadow and light play across those cuts the way they do on a relief, here on a simple practice piece.

Carving like this turns up in Greek work and in some other European woodcarving too. You are not doing something modern.

Your finished piece goes into the assessment too. Upload a photo of what you make on the assessment page at the end of the course, and I will review it.

Can carving actually earn anything?

Yes, and I want to be precise about the scale. I am not talking about twenty dollars here, nor a hundred, nor even a thousand.

I mean tens of thousands of dollars in profit, and one knife is what earned it. That is the reason I tell beginners to buy the good blade and stop agonising over what it costs.

None of that arrives in a month. Skill has to exist first, and skill is built by somebody sitting at a table making the same three cuts again and again.

Why does any of this matter?

Young kids come to the gym, push dumbbells for one day, then walk to the mirror to see what grew. Nothing grew. Nothing can grow in a day, and expecting otherwise is childish.

Scripture calls the man who built the tabernacle as filled with the spirit of wisdom, knowledge and understanding. Carvers are wise people. I do not say that lightly about my own trade.

Students come to this school from Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Canada. Send me your results once the molding is done. I will tell you honestly where you stand.

First workshop of the course. Workshop two carries the same knife further, and the course itself holds both. From there the beginner course runs sixteen more workshops on a cutting board, and the antique rosette is carved with gouges, once you have them. Gouges get chosen in the tools course, and specifically here, while every edge on this site depends on sharpening. Why ornament moves the way it does belongs to the design course. Further out wait the Greek acanthus, a flower rosette, a floral panel and eventually the Venice Room. Who I am is told in a course of its own.

Three angles, one blade, and a kitchen table. Access to the school opens every course above.

Shall we carve?