Learn wood carving at your own bench in Abilene, TX

I teach Woodcarving Master Classes 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. I am not in Abilene, TX and I will not pretend to be. 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 Classes near Abilene, 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. A nice line, and it teaches you nothing. 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 Abilene, 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 gave me no notes at all. 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.

He is the reason I can carve at all. Try to hire it in Abilene, TX and see how far you get. 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.

I do not want you feeling sorry for me. 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 tools were nothing. The teaching was everything.

Why the videos have not taught you to carve yet

You have been here before, I would bet. 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 cause is not talent and it is not your hands. You were shown the RESULT of a cut. Nobody showed you the cut itself. You watched a person and a product. The work happened in the gap. You cannot copy what you were not allowed to see. Every person who ever typed Woodcarving Master Classes 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. The master cuts once and the back row sees a shoulder. 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. 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 Classes 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. Sharp steel flatters whoever is holding it. Which is why a whole course exists on Carving Tool Sharpening, and not one buried video.

I know what the wrong order does, because it walks into my classes. Tools, then tracing, and design gets skipped forever. 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 Master Classes, honestly

Let me tell you exactly what happens if you start with me tonight. Week one you draw. Pencil only, and I know that is not what you came for.

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. By week four there is a carved leaf on your bench that you made. Good is not the word for it, and good is not the point. 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 the order is what saves you the wasted years.

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. Shiny surface, and you now know what I mean by sharp. 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 Abilene, 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. The hard stuff takes effort you have not got to spare yet, and gives back nothing at all while your hand is still learning where an edge wants to go. 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.

You do not need more than that from me today. 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 Classes 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.

I can fill your head in a weekend. Only repetition fills your hands. 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 Classes 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. Access renews automatically each month, and cancelling is one click on your own account page. A single good gouge costs more than a month with me, which should tell you where the money in this craft really goes.

Cash first, tools second, and I would rather say so than take it. 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.

Weigh it against the alternative for a second. 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 Classes

The spread is wider than any classroom I ever stood in. Professionals sharpening up and beginners starting cold.

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.

Carving has rules, and the people here keep them. 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 was one of those children.

So here is what I am really offering you. Not videos. The thing that made me, taken apart and filmed so it can reach your bench in Abilene, 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?

Take the sharpening advice and go well, either way. 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.