Learn wood carving at your own bench in Gilmer, 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 Gilmer, 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.

Did you ever hold a board and want to open it up? When you searched for Woodcarving Master Class near Gilmer, 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 Gilmer, 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 never once told me to go read something. He stood over my shoulder and corrected the angle with his thumb. 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.

Everything I can do came out of those years. Nowhere in Gilmer, TX is that sitting on a shelf. 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.

I tell you that for one reason only. 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. Steel was the thing I lacked. The method I already had.

Why the videos have not taught you to carve yet

Almost nobody finds me first. 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.

Nothing about that was your fault. You were shown the RESULT of a cut. Nobody showed you the cut itself. The camera sat in front of him, so you watched his face and the finished leaf. 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. Run it back as many times as you need. 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. Design, then carving, then sharpening. In that order. 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. The edge is what people mistake for talent. 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. Steel first, pattern second, and no design ever. 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, 618 lessons and 3,036 video parts. Every one of them is a cut filmed the way I needed it filmed.

Your first month of Woodcarving Master Class, honestly

You should have the plain shape of it now. 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. 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. Inside a year you will pass a lot of self taught carvers.

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

This is yours whether you join me or not. Cut up a belt and glue it down. 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. Shiny means you are there. A fuzzy surface means your bevel is rounded, and no new tool will fix that. New tools will not save you. The leather will.

The wood around Gilmer, 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. Standing at a bench with eight people around me is one of the best parts of this work, and I would do far more of it if the shop let me. They sell out in about eight minutes, and even so I am telling you they are not the answer on their own.

It helps. It does not finish anything. 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.

Listen, if the money is the hard part today, carving can wait for you. 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.

Compare it honestly and then make your own call. 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

My students start at fourteen years old and run past ninety. Cabinet makers who can build anything and cannot decorate it, restorers, retired engineers, and people who simply want one beautiful thing in the house.

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. You are holding a shape in your head and cutting toward it, and that is hard mental work. I train my body every day too, weights and walking, because I do not just carve wood. I carve myself.

We are a trade with standards, not a craft club. 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. The money was not there.

So here is what I am really offering you. Not videos. The old way of learning, carried to a town where no master lives. 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?

And if it does not, close this page with my blessing. 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.