Learn wood carving at your own bench in Edroy, 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. Ask around Edroy, TX and nobody will point you to me. That part is true. I can give you the one thing I needed most at sixteen and could not have bought at any price.

Ever look at a clean panel and know a leaf belongs in it? When you searched for Woodcarving Master Class near Edroy, 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 Edroy, 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. 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. That kind of teaching has almost vanished. 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.

My tools were gone. 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.

Now the part that has to do with you. 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

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. Everything that mattered was under his hand. 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. Whoever stands closest gets the lesson, and that is not usually you. Then everybody drives home and works from memory, and memory is a liar about angles.

How I rebuilt that apprenticeship for you

My shot looks down the tool, the way he looked down mine. You see the bevel, the grain and the chip lifting, blown up across your whole screen. And nobody sighs when you play it again. 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. First the drawing, and yes, that is the unpopular answer. 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. Honed steel hides a great deal of inexperience. 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. He can cut anything and choose nothing. 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

Let me tell you exactly what happens if you start with me tonight. Week one you draw. Nothing but a pencil, and it feels like a waste until it does not.

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. In four weeks you own a leaf you carved. Rough as it is, that is still the most important leaf you will ever carve. 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 a month of the real method puts you past years of guessing.

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

Take this now, it costs you nothing. 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. If the surface comes off shiny, you have just felt what sharp actually means. A fuzzy surface means your bevel is rounded, and no new tool will fix that. Students spend hundreds on steel when the fault was never the steel.

The wood around Edroy, 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. Multiply the labor and subtract the reward. 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.

Enough about species. 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. Face to face teaching still happens, and I love it. 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 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. 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.

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.

The comparison is worth thirty seconds of your time. One weekend workshop is the tuition, plus the flight, plus two nights in a hotel, plus the days off work. Three days, and then you are on your own again. 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

The youngest is a teenager. Cabinet makers who can build anything and cannot decorate it, restorers, retired engineers, and people who simply want one beautiful thing in the house.

One more reason, and it is the one I did not see coming. Carving in three dimensions builds new brain cells and works parts of your mind that drawing and painting never reach. Every evening you solve a solid problem with your hands. I train my body every day too, weights and walking, because I do not just carve wood. I carve myself.

You are stepping into a line of people who did this properly. 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. There was no money for art school in my house.

So here is what I am really offering you. Not videos. My teacher's method, filmed from his angle, waiting in Edroy, 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?

Work you do not want is work you should not do. Truly. 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.