Learn wood carving at your own bench in Big Wells, TX

I teach Woodcarving Tutorials 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. Nothing of mine stands in Big Wells, TX. Let me say that before anything else. 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 Tutorials near Big Wells, 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 Big Wells, 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 handed me nothing to read, ever. He showed me, I copied him, he fixed what was wrong. 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. Nobody in Big Wells, TX is selling it. 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

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 cause is not talent and it is not your hands. You were shown the RESULT of a cut. Nobody showed you the cut itself. The angle of the tool was hidden behind his knuckles the entire time. You cannot copy what you were not allowed to see. Every person who ever typed Woodcarving Tutorials 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

So I put the camera where my master's eyes were. 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 Tutorials 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. Hand a beginner a properly honed gouge and watch what happens. Which is why a whole course exists on Carving Tool Sharpening, and not one buried video.

People come to me having learned it backwards, and I see what it did. 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 reason is simple. He never owned the leaf. 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. Four decades of bench work sit there, laid out in the order it should be learned.

Your first month of Woodcarving Tutorials, honestly

My expectation of you in four weeks runs like this. Week one you draw. You draw the leaf badly, many times. Those bad leaves are the assignment.

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. One month, one small carving, done properly. 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.

Anyone promising you a shortcut is selling something. 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

I am going to give you one true thing before you decide anything. 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. Comes off bright? Then that is the standard, and now you have felt it. 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 Big Wells, 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. Same lesson. Four times the sweat. 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 Tutorials 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. When a school asks and the dates work, I go. They sell out in about eight minutes, and even so I am telling you they are not the answer on their own.

Come if you can get there, but do not wait for it. 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 Tutorials 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.

Money tight? Then hold off, and I mean that kindly. 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. 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 Tutorials

Teenagers, and great grandfathers. People who make things for a living, and people who never have.

Something should be said about what this does to your mind. Carving in three dimensions builds new brain cells and works parts of your mind that drawing and painting never reach. Depth, light, shadow, the shape underneath. Your mind never stops working. I train my body every day too, weights and walking, because I do not just carve wood. I carve myself.

We hold each other to the old standard, and I will hold you to it too. 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. Nobody was paying for my education, and the talent sat there with nowhere to go for years.

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

If you read all that and felt nothing, then carving is not your craft, and walking away is a perfectly good answer. 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.