Learn wood carving at your own bench in Dodd City, TX

I teach Woodcarving Workshops 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 Dodd City, 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.

Have you put your hand on a rough board and felt something waiting there? When you searched for Woodcarving Workshops near Dodd City, 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. That award is not why I am worth your time. 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 Dodd City, 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 did not hand me a book. 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.

What I know, I know because of him. Nobody sells it near you, at any price. 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.

Then the world had other plans. 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.

Skip the sympathy, it is useless to both of us. 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. Bad tools, real training, and the work still came out.

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.

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 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 Workshops 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. 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 Workshops 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. With a truly sharp edge your first leaf looks like somebody's fifth. 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. They start with steel, then trace somebody's pattern, and the drawing never happens. Ten years later he can reproduce anything and design nothing, and he cannot understand why his work looks like a copy. He learned the hand and never the eye. 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. It is the same road he walked me down, only you can walk it at your own speed.

Your first month of Woodcarving Workshops, honestly

Here is what your first four weeks actually look like. 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. Week four you finish something small enough to hold in one hand. Mistakes will be all over it, and I want you to keep it anyway. 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 you will be further in one month with me than in three years of watching free videos.

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

Let me hand you something useful before you close the page. You want something soft and flat to charge with compound, and the back of an old belt does the job, or an offcut from a shoe repair shop. 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. Do not go shopping. Go stropping.

The wood around Dodd City, 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. More than four times the fight, for the same leaf. 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.

So much for lumber. 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 Workshops 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 Workshops 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. Automatic monthly renewal, cancelled by you, on your own page. A single good gouge costs more than a month with me, which should tell you where the money in this craft really goes.

Steel costs money and pretending otherwise would be a lie. 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.

Set it beside what a live class costs you. One weekend workshop is the tuition, plus the flight, plus two nights in a hotel, plus the days off work. A weekend of me, and years of you alone afterward. 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 Workshops

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. Watching a screen does none of this. Cutting toward a shape does all of it. 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. 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. One apprenticeship, which is the best way to learn this and always was. 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?

Should that sound like a burden rather than a pleasure, this is not for you, and I would rather you knew. 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.