Learn wood carving at your own bench in Gorman, TX

I teach Woodcarving Masterclass 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 bench is nowhere near Gorman, TX, so let us be honest from the start. 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 Masterclass near Gorman, 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. Awards are the least interesting thing I own. 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 Gorman, 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. Not one page of theory came my way. He made me watch one cut, then do it, then do it again. 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 built the carver I am. No amount of money finds you one in Gorman, TX. 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.

For a long stretch there was no shop 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. 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

You have watched a few of them already. 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 wrong thing was put in front of 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 Masterclass 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 nearest pair of eyes learns the angle. The others learn nothing. Then everybody drives home and works from memory, and memory is a liar about angles.

How I rebuilt that apprenticeship for you

So you get his view of my hands, which is what I had at sixteen. You see the bevel, the grain and the chip lifting, blown up across your whole screen. It will do that again all night if you want. My master could not do that for me. He was one man with one afternoon. That is the difference between Woodcarving Masterclass 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 a pencil, then a gouge. He would not let me skip it and neither will I. 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.

My strictness about the order comes from watching it play out many times. They own beautiful tools and can only reproduce other people's work. Ten years later he can reproduce anything and design nothing, and he cannot understand why his work looks like a copy. The work is competent and it belongs to somebody else. 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. What took me years of standing at his elbow is sitting there waiting for you.

Your first month of Woodcarving Masterclass, honestly

You should have the plain shape of it now. 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. By week four there is a carved leaf on your bench that you made. 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.

Anyone promising you a shortcut is selling something. Sharpening alone took me years to learn properly. But four weeks in the right order beats three years of clips in the wrong one.

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

I am going to give you one true thing before you decide anything. A strop is a piece of leather stuck to something flat. Nothing more. 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. A polished surface is the answer you want. 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 Gorman, 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. Not one bit more beauty in a first carving, and every cut costs you double. 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 Masterclass 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. Not often. 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 Masterclass 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.

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.

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. Then it ends, and the questions start. 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 Masterclass

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.

And here is a benefit nobody mentions when they sell you a class. 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.

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 was one of those children.

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.