Learn wood carving at your own bench in Brownwood, TX

I teach Woodcarving instructor online, and you can start with me tonight. You watch my hands from up close, you make the same cut on your own board, and you play it again if it went wrong. Nothing of mine stands in Brownwood, TX. Let me say that before anything else. I can give you the one thing I needed most at sixteen and could not have bought at any price.

Ever pick up a plank and wonder what is inside it? When you searched for Woodcarving instructor near Brownwood, TX, you were hoping a real person would turn up. Have you watched a carving video, understood every word, and then made a mess of it at your own bench an hour later? Do you want to draw your own ornament instead of tracing somebody else's forever?

Then sit down, because I want to tell you something. My name is Alexander Grabovetskiy. I have carved for over forty years and I was named International Woodcarver of the Year. I did not open with that to impress you. What matters is how I got here, because it is the one thing standing between you and a carved leaf.

What I got at sixteen that you cannot buy in Brownwood, TX

At sixteen I became the only apprentice of a fine-art master, the old European way, one student and one teacher at one bench. He did not hand me a book. He worked and I watched from a foot away, then it was my turn. He kept using the word design until I was sick of hearing it. Not drawing, he would say, and then go quiet and let me sit with that for a while. He meant the laws of space, rhythm, repetition, and thinking like the tool in your hand. It took me about two years to hear what he was actually saying.

That apprenticeship made me. Nobody sells it near you, at any price. There are not enough masters left. The ones still working are carving, because carving is what pays, and teaching one student at a bench for years does not, so it has more or less stopped.

Then everything stopped. I was arrested at eighteen for my faith. In prison I carved furniture with a knife I made myself, ten millimeters of steel, and a small gouge I made out of a nail. My pay was one boiled potato a day. One potato. I shared it with other men and we talked about God, and I got down under eighty pounds.

Skip the sympathy, it is useless to both of us. A nail and a scrap of steel were enough, because somebody had already shown me how to hold them. Years later I landed in America on a Saturday and had a framing carpenter job by the Monday, with no English at all. Nobody there cared what I could carve. Give me a nail and a teacher's voice in my head and I can work.

Why the videos have not taught you to carve yet

The road here usually runs through a failed evening at somebody's kitchen table. You found a video, you watched a man finish a beautiful leaf in nine minutes, and you understood every word he said. Then you sat down at your own board and it went wrong, and you could not say why.

The problem is in the camera, not in you. You were shown the RESULT of a cut. Nobody showed you the cut itself. The lens looked at the man, not at the edge. You cannot copy what you were not allowed to see. Every person who ever typed Woodcarving instructor into a search box was really asking for the same thing. Somebody to show them the cut properly, once, from the right angle.

A weekend class near you has the same hole in it, only more expensive. Two people at the front learn something and the rest guess. Then everybody drives home and works from memory, and memory is a liar about angles.

How I rebuilt that apprenticeship for you

I gave the camera his job. You see the bevel, the grain and the chip lifting, blown up across your whole screen. Stop it, back it up, watch it once more. My master could not do that for me. He was one man with one afternoon. That is the difference between Woodcarving instructor on a screen and a master at your shoulder, and I have spent years closing it.

I teach it in the order he taught me, and I will not shuffle it to make it easier to sell. Design comes first, and it is the part students argue with me about. Look at the Principles of Design in Wood Carving course and you will see what he meant about the laws of space.

Then carving, which is heavier work than people expect. You are digging inside the wood and removing mass, and your shoulders will tell you about it the next day. Then sharpening, which takes the longest to learn and which almost nobody teaches properly. With a truly sharp edge your first leaf looks like somebody's fifth. Which is why a whole course exists on Carving Tool Sharpening, and not one buried video.

The sequence is not my preference. Getting it right wins you years. Getting it wrong loses them. First the shopping, then the copying, and the thinking never arrives. Ten years later he can reproduce anything and design nothing, and he cannot understand why his work looks like a copy. The answer is that it is a copy, and copies always look like copies. I would rather cost you one uncomfortable week of drawing than ten years of that.

Behind one login I have put 46 courses, 619 lessons and 3,039 video parts. Think of it as him standing behind you, except he never leaves.

Your first month of Woodcarving instructor, honestly

Here is what your first four weeks actually look like. Week one you draw. You will not touch a gouge, and you will not enjoy it.

Week two you sharpen, and you find out that your tools were never sharp. Week three you make your first real cuts on a small board, and they will be rough. At the end of the month you are holding something you cut yourself. It will not be beautiful. Keep it on a shelf, because in a year you will pick it up and see how far your hands have come.

Speed is the one thing I cannot sell you. Sharpening alone took me years to learn properly. But most people never get past week one on their own, and you will.

Something for you right now, whether you ever pay me or not

Here is a real piece of my teaching, free, today. Find a scrap of leather, an old belt will do, and glue it to a flat board. Rub honing compound on it, lay your gouge bevel flat, and pull the tool backwards toward you. Twenty strokes. Never push.

Now cut a curl in a piece of basswood. Comes off bright? Then that is the standard, and now you have felt it. A fuzzy surface means your bevel is rounded, and no new tool will fix that. Do not go shopping. Go stropping.

The wood around Brownwood, TX, in one paragraph

Texas will hand you mesquite, pecan and live oak, and every one of them will fight a beginner. Pecan tests about 1,820 lbf on the Janka scale. American basswood is 410. That gap is why your first year belongs to the soft one. So buy basswood for the learning years, and save the pecan for when you can do it justice. None of that is me being soft with you. A tool that goes dull in ten cuts will tell you that you have no talent, and it will be lying.

And that is all the wood talk you will get from me here. Your problem was never which tree it came from. It is that nobody has ever stood behind you and shown you the first cut. That is the only thing I am actually offering, and it is the only thing Woodcarving instructor should ever have meant.

I do teach in person, and it is not enough

I still teach live a few times a year, and the Austin School of Furniture has hosted one of my classes. It is rare. They sell out in about eight minutes, and even so I am telling you they are not the answer on their own.

Good for your hands and no substitute for practice. Repetition is the only thing that has ever made a carver, and repetition is exactly what an apprenticeship gives you and a workshop cannot. If you want Woodcarving instructor that actually changes your hands, you want the thing that repeats.

What it costs, and who should not join me

$25 a month opens all of it, and a year of Access is $200. Automatically renewed each month, and ended by you the moment you decide. A single good gouge costs more than a month with me, which should tell you where the money in this craft really goes.

Steel costs money and pretending otherwise would be a lie. Get a pencil and paper and draw leaves for six months. Drawing is free, and it is the part that matters most anyway. Saying that costs me a student and I will say it anyway.

Line it up against a weekend class and look. One weekend workshop is the tuition, plus the flight, plus two nights in a hotel, plus the days off work. A wonderful weekend, and no Tuesday. A year with me is $200 and I am there every Tuesday night in November when the leaf goes wrong and you cannot see why.

Who comes to me for Woodcarving instructor

The youngest is a teenager. Furniture makers, restorers, church volunteers, and beginners who have never held a gouge.

Something else happens to you at the bench, and I did not expect it either. Carving in three dimensions builds new brain cells and works parts of your mind that drawing and painting never reach. The 3D part is what makes it work, and it is why old carvers stay sharp. I train my body every day too, weights and walking, because I do not just carve wood. I carve myself.

We hold each other to the old standard, and I will hold you to it too. And part of what you pay leaves this school entirely. It funds orphans and widows, and it sponsors children with talent whose families cannot pay for art education. I know exactly what that child feels, because I was him.

So here is what I am really offering you. Not videos. My teacher's method, filmed from his angle, waiting in Brownwood, TX. Start with the beginners course and one board of basswood, and carve something the size of your hand before you go near a door panel. If that sounds like your kind of work, shall we carve?

Should none of it appeal to you, walk away and keep the strop trick. This is slow, physical, expensive work that takes years, and I am not going to dress it up as anything else. But if you have wanted it since you were a boy, and nobody ever showed you how, then I know exactly where you are standing. I stood there too.