Learn wood carving at your own bench in Bovina, TX

I teach Woodcarving Master Class 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. My shop is a long way from Bovina, TX, and I am not going to hide it. I can give you the one thing I needed most at sixteen and could not have bought at any price.

Have you put your hand on a rough board and felt something waiting there? When you searched for Woodcarving Master Class near Bovina, 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. None of that is what I want to talk about. 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 Bovina, 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. No book, and no diagram either. My hand went where his hand had been, over and over. 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.

After that I had nothing to work with at all. 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. The method survived when everything else was taken.

Why the videos have not taught you to carve yet

By now you have probably tried. 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 reason is simple and nobody says it out loud. You were shown the RESULT of a cut. Nobody showed you the cut itself. You saw a carver, and a leaf, and nothing in between. You cannot copy what you were not allowed to see. Every person who ever typed Woodcarving Master Class 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. Eleven people, one pair of hands, one chance to see it. Then everybody drives home and works from memory, and memory is a liar about angles.

How I rebuilt that apprenticeship for you

It lives over my shoulder now and never leaves the edge. You see the bevel, the grain and the chip lifting, blown up across your whole screen. And the tenth repeat costs you nothing. My master could not do that for me. He was one man with one afternoon. That is the difference between Woodcarving Master Class 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. The layout comes before the steel. 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. Clean cuts look like skill, and only sharp tools cut clean. Which is why a whole course exists on Carving Tool Sharpening, and not one buried video.

I care about the order because I have watched what happens without it. They buy the gouges, trace a leaf, and stop there for ten years. Ten years later he can reproduce anything and design nothing, and he cannot understand why his work looks like a copy. Nothing in it is his, so nothing in it looks like him. I would rather cost you one uncomfortable week of drawing than ten years of that.

Behind one login I have put 46 courses, 618 lessons and 3,036 video parts. Think of it as him standing behind you, except he never leaves.

Your first month of Woodcarving Master Class, honestly

You should know what you are walking into, so here it is. Week one you draw. That week is paper, and students argue with me about it every time.

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. Week four you finish something small enough to hold in one hand. Mistakes will be all over it, and I want you to keep it anyway. Keep it on a shelf, because in a year you will pick it up and see how far your hands have come.

It takes what it takes, and that is years. Sharpening alone took me years to learn properly. But nothing wastes your time like learning it backwards.

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

Here is a real piece of my teaching, free, today. Take whatever soft material you have and fix it to a board so it cannot slide. 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. When it shines, stop and remember what your hands just did. A fuzzy surface means your bevel is rounded, and no new tool will fix that. I have watched men buy four hundred dollars of gouges to solve a problem a piece of leather solves.

The wood around Bovina, 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. A beginner feels every extra pound of it in the shoulder. 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.

Lumber advice ends there. 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 Master Class 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. I travel for it two or three times each year. They sell out in about eight minutes, and even so I am telling you they are not the answer on their own.

Two days beside me cannot do what two years at your own bench does. 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 Master Class 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. The plan renews automatically month by month, and you shut it off yourself, no email needed. A single good gouge costs more than a month with me, which should tell you where the money in this craft really goes.

Wait a while if the money is not there. Nobody is going anywhere. 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. Seventy two hours, and then the door closes. 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 Master Class

I have a man of ninety one at the bench and a boy not old enough to drive, and both of them send me photographs of the same leaf. People who make things for a living, and people who never have.

My ninety year old students are sharp, and it is not luck. 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.

You learn it the way it was handed to me, and you join that line. 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. One master at your shoulder, which is the only way I know that works. 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?

Carving is not for everybody, and you will get no argument from me. 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.