by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: January 17, 2009

This article covers simple projects for people who are beginning to learn woodcarving. It really is a wonderful craft and although you may think that it takes too much skill, these crafts allow you to experiment with limited tools and little expense in deciding whether wood carving is really your cup of tea. Tried and tested on the woods suggested, these designs help the carver to begin to see shape and form, shadow and depth, which all help them to find the direction in which their carving hobby will take them.

You will need:

*A piece of flat timber approx 8" square. (see wood types below).
*V chisel
*Small gouge chisel.
*Medium gouge.
*Paper
*Design (See below).
*Woodcarving mallet.

Woods.

The kind of woods which are the easiest to use are fruit woods such as cherry, walnut, chestnut and beech. These are woods which are not too brittle and which will respond well to your carving. Other hardwoods tend to split and give disappointing results to the beginner. The more seasoned the wood the better, since it would be disappointing to produce woodcarving projects which split, which is likely on unseasoned wood. Carving wet wood will also ruin the sharpness of chisels.

Designs.

There are several design books available from Dover Books, though the ones which are good are the Celtic designs and floral designs. Choose a design which is not too complex. The easier the better for the first project. A simple rose or a Celtic design which is a series of lines with a plain background are the easiest to start with.

Draw out your design.

You can trace the design and then use a photographic program to make the design bigger or smaller, or if you have the eye for it, scale this to size which you require, allowing a border all around your work. The carving should never reach the edges since this may break. When you have drawn this, transfer it onto the wood using carbon paper.

Deciding where to carve first.

Decide which area counts as background, and make pencil markings to show that this needs carving out. Decide also which parts of the carving need to be given more depth. The Celtic designs are ideal for the beginner since these have natural under and over lines which will help you to be able to create the illusion of depth. Mark the unders and overs so that you can decide on the depth you need to carve.

V Chisel the shapes.

Use the V chisel to outline the work that you want to perform. This makes a neat line and should only be done where the background meets the design. This gives you a definite

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