Woodcarving Techniques, Tips, and Tricks, Q and A

Wood carving technique is mostly how you read the grain and which tool you grab for it. You look at the grain and decide which way to attack. You take the biggest tool the shape will hold. Then you slice instead of shoving, and when the wood fights you anyway, you stop and sharpen.

Did a channel ever come off clean on one wall and split on the other? Has a small gouge ever taken you forever on a big shape? I see both in my classes, from beginners and from people who have carved for years. Most answers below come out of this course, in my own words from the lessons.

What decides whether the wood fights you

• Grab the widest gouge the shape allows, and go small only for the last details.
• Short grain to long grain works on an outside curve, and stops working on an inside curve.
• If the grain fights you, sharpen your tools.
• Slice by rotating the tool through the pass instead of pushing it straight ahead.
• Sandpaper is fine under gold leaf. Skip it when you want the tool marks.
• Punch a background with a thick nail, ground and filed, when you can't buy a punch set.
• Stabilize thin petals with thin super glue, then lay the piece on acoustic foam before you carve the back.

Which gouge should you pick up first?

Pick the biggest one the shape will hold. People take a small tool and keep at it, and keep at it, and they spend so much time on it that they get frustrated. My big gouge measures 80 mm across, three inches and one eighth, and it knocks the mass off a project in one day.

Here is how I put it in class. Flying from Florida to Maine took me five and a half hours. Driving would have run about thirty. The Appalachian Trail takes months on foot, and people really walk it. A big gouge is the airplane and a 20 mm is the drive, and a small tool still gets you there too, but it takes you about forever.

Big first, then medium, and the small ones only for details. Starting small is one of the biggest mistakes I see, even from people who have carved for years.

I look at my tools as an army. At a sharpening class in Maine I put it this way. Every gouge is a soldier with one job, and the bigger the army the bigger the ground you can take. Two tools on your side will still carve, but you're limited in what territory you can do. I am the general.

Why does one side of a channel shred?

Fibers on that side have nothing underneath holding them up. In carving with the grain I drew a donut on the board, and on the outside of that ring you begin where the fibers are short and finish into the long ones.

The other way to see it is support. Take a bundle of drinking straws and rub your hand along them. One way is easy. The other is like petting a dog against the grain. Under the face of a board the longer fibers below hold up the shorter ones above, and a pass that runs against that support lifts the fibers and fights you.

Inside a bowl the grain changes direction as you carve, so you have to attack it from the opposite side. Even with almost no sweep there is still a marriage line, as we call it. Carve past it and the wood splits. So you attack from both sides.

And in a complicated carving you sometimes have to work against the grain no matter what. Carve in the Grinling Gibbons style and there is no such thing as carving with the grain. You have to attack the wood from some angles. Sharp tools. That is the only solution I gave that class. Sharpening is the second of the three big parts of wood carving, after design, and carving itself is the most important.

How should you hold the gouge?

Two hands, and the second one decides how clean the pass comes off. You can swap hands when you carve the other side, and plenty of carvers do, myself included. There is another way that saves the swap. Keep the same hand on the handle and rotate the tool instead, which is a really fun trick, and you can practice it. Whichever you pick, move your second hand closer to the blade. The nearer that hand sits to the edge, the more control you have, and the cleaner the surface it leaves.

There is a rule in wood carving that you never carve toward yourself, because it's dangerous. In breaking the rule of direction I explain my exception. On a huge piece you sometimes can't rotate the work, so you still have to carve toward yourself. Then I lock my hands, elbows on the work table, so I can stop and the tool won't fly at me. I saw it done by one of my students, a dentist. The moves stay small, and for small work like that it works really fine, with no problem at all.

What does a carver mean by a slicing pass?

Rotating the tool through the pass instead of shoving it forward. Watch the slicing lesson and you see me do it as I carve, just a small turn of the gouge while it moves. You can push too, before the refining starts. At the finish it changes, because every surface you leave has to be clean straight off the tool, and true masters never reached for paper to fix it.

Do you need sandpaper on a carving?

Sandpaper depends on the finish, and on how that finish goes on. When I filmed that answer I was carving a shade for a pipe organ in New York City, mid German Baroque, pierced so about half the panel is holes. All of it goes under water gilded gold leaf. Gold needs a stabilized, shiny ground, so that one gets sanded.

Old shops had none and still got there. In England they used reed rush, the same stuff sold in music shops, and it works out to roughly 400 grit. Gibbons used it. Other carvers reached for shark skin. Fifteenth century men took a shard of glass and scraped.

Scraping still works, and I do it with a carving knife across the whole surface. After that you burnish with a chip of the same species, basswood on basswood, and it comes up shiny with no metal burnisher anywhere near it. Most of the time I don't burnish at all, by the way. For gold I finish with a 4,000 grit mesh. The mesh lets dust fall through instead of pressing abrasive down into the wood.

Under a tool finish, leave the paper in the drawer. Every pass has to come off clean.

What is the difference between a straight gouge, a fishtail and a longy?

In one of my questions and answers I laid two number 9 gouges side by side, both marked 6 mm. The straight one has a long groove inside. The fishtail has only a tail, like a fish, and the rest is just a stem.

Shape of shank	Where it earns its keep at work	Weak spot
Straight gouge with a long groove	Lasts a lifetime	Will not turn once inside a hole
The fishtail	Drops in, rotates, carves all around	Only a short groove
Longy with a shank that tapers back	Gets inside a hole	Cannot rotate in a tight pocket
Reshaped V tool	Wings ground back to clear an undercut	A straight one still does a wall that is not undercut

That's how I do my deep excavations, with a fishtail. A number 9 at 6 mm drops into a hole, turns, and carves the whole inside wall, which no straight tool of mine will do. I also use just the corner of a fishtail to reach tiny spots a straight tool cannot. Two number 7s at 14 mm, one fishtail and one longy, do exactly the same operation until you need to rotate in the hole.

The last row comes from my V tool lesson. When you undercut a wall and the channel still has to reach in, the only way is to reshape the V tool and take the wings back. Mostly I use a straight one, or one with the wings taken back.

How deep are you supposed to go?

I see it first, and in my online school I say the number out loud. Six millimeters, a quarter inch, and I give both because my students come from so many countries that I don't even know the number. Seeing depth is something you develop. Think of learning cursive between two ruled lines, and how after a while you stopped needing the lines at all. Carving in three dimensions goes the same way, as I said in the lesson on mastery. The more you dig the more you see, and one piece of mine goes about eight inches deep.

Can you punch a background without buying a punch set?

Grind a nail. A framing nail, the thickest you can find, flattened on the end and then filed with a triangle file until it carries a pattern. I have done that a lot, and the nail gives you more freedom in the pattern than a bought set does.

The bought sets are good as well. My dotted background lesson uses a set of five from Woodcarvers Supply, three round, one square, one rectangle, and mine matched the original piece exactly. My main one is 5 mm, so 3/16, and the little rectangle runs 3 by 10 mm.

For the bubbly ground on 15 rosettes copied from an antique carving, I use leather punches. Search for background punches for leather and you land on exactly the tool, in three sizes, matching the original carving. Google background tools for wood carving and you find nothing at all.

Ten or fifteen minutes of punching, at the most, separates a design from its ground. Stain then sits darker in the punched area, so a shallow furniture carving suddenly reads deep. The four pieces in that lesson were for a dining table apron.

What keeps a thin petal from snapping while you carve behind it?

Glue in the fibers first, then something soft underneath. Undercutting is what casts the shadow, and I think carving is all about light and shadow. The better way to undercut is to flip the piece and attack it from the back, which is back cutting.

Three ways to stiffen the wood, and the finish picks which one. Wood glue thinned half and half with water soaks in and hardens the fibers, and you will not be able to stain it nicely later. Thin super glue penetrates beautifully, though by my reckoning it holds for about five years. Wood hardener, the stuff sold for rotten exterior wood, takes two or three coats and still lets you stain.

On a painted piece that sits at about shoulder level, I ran thin Starbond all the way through the thin parts, because somebody could hit it. Left raw, with no finish at all, I wouldn't use that glue.

Later, on the Tray of Blessing, I used penetrating epoxy instead, and there I said a hardener is not really going to do anything. The idea came from a friend of mine, a luthier who builds upright basses, and I tell that story in stabilizing with epoxy.

Now the flip. Bench cookies will not save you, because you still press down and the petals go. I lay the piece on ribbed acoustic studio foam, the sort people hang on a wall to kill echo, and it takes the pressure without breaking anything. Small tools only from the back, a 5 mm Dockyard rather than something with real force behind it.

That piece is one panel of a whole Venetian room. If something breaks anyway, I glue it back from a small bottle and keep working.

What holds the work while you carve it?

One clamp I like is a Festool clamp. It locks to my workbench really quickly, and I work around whatever areas I need. The same system works as stop blocks. Drop them into the holes wherever the piece sits and carve with nothing locked down at all. They take the shape really easily, and I can work at whatever angle I need.

Does a traditional carver use an iPad?

Lately, this one does, and an Android pad will work too. In the iPad lesson I draw the extra details a client asks for in Procreate, on a canvas set to real inches at 400 dpi, with the peppermint pencil.

About ten years ago, maybe more, a client wanted an acanthus leaf moved higher on a drawing ten feet long, shaped like a headboard. I took a razor to the paper, erased hours of work, and redrew it. He rang back and asked to shift it right. I call that the dancing stage, and on paper it is a waste of time.

The drawing goes into SketchUp next, so I can scale it to the millimeter, which matters when a finished carving has to land on a wall. My SketchUp lesson shows how I scale a sketch up or down to the size of the block. Then a PDF, then the print shop. One sheet 36 inches by 120 inches costs less than you think, so I decided I don't need a plotter.

Carbon paper moves it onto the board and the jigsaw takes the waste off. I tried Bosch, I tried DeWalt, and for me the best jigsaw is a Festool, because it gives me absolutely 90 degrees. Design is the first of the three big parts of wood carving. Nowadays you can skip it and print a pattern off the internet, but I built a whole course on design.

The one habit worth stealing from this course

Stop overcomplicating. That was the first thing my teacher taught me about sharpening. He told me not to spend money on stones until I had money to spend, and to lay sandpaper on a bench instead.

I still do it. For the inside of a tiny gouge I buy 6,000 grit automotive paper at Home Depot. I keep sandpaper in the kitchen, put it on the countertop, and my wife always has the sharpest knives. In prison I carved furniture with a handmade 10 mm knife and a tiny gouge made from a nail, and they paid me one boiled potato a day. One potato.

A thick nail still makes a good background punch, and paper on a bench still sharpens a gouge. When you want to try it with me, start here.

Shall we carve?