Simple Carving With Basic Tools

hey y'all I'm James Wright and welcome to the shop today I want to talk about carving and you may have noticed I put carving into a lot of the tools that I use and things that are on hand not because it's it's amazing or anything special but I like just putting a little bit of detail in there and if you understand a few basic things you'll realize this doesn't take that much time it really doesn't take that much skill either but if you don't have an entire roll of carving tools I want to show you how you can do it with just a simple bench chisel so let's dive in and take a look at how to do a simple Celtic weave with just a few basic tools [Music] now first off why would I do a Celtic weave well number one I like this design I like the shape and it's just it's an easy thing that most people can do and this is a great basic pattern that you can quickly jump into the project and most people can do this really easily and so that's why I end up putting it on a lot of my tools different Celtic weaves like that this was actually the very first thing I ever attempted at carving and it's really not that difficult this took me probably about an hour to figure out and this one I actually hand drew that most the time i print out patterns most of these patterns I actually just go to Google and I'll do an image search for Celtic weave and there'll be hundreds of these I'll find one I like I print it out and whenever you print it it allows you to size what size it is and I get it close to what I want or I might print it out in a couple different sizes and then bring it over the board and say which one actually fits in here but what if I want it even longer well one of the nice things about Celtic leaves is you can cut these at any one of these Junction points and then throw in more weave in between and now you can extend it longer so I can grab another one here and I'm going to cut it in between the joints of the weave and then I can stick this in in between what I had before and just like that we've got ourselves a longer weave and I can make this any length I want or I could even take out weaves and make something shorter to be any size I want all the way down to something as little as that or something as big as however much I can print for adhering the pattern down I like to use just a simple glue stick that I steal from the kids art supplies you'll hear hundreds of different other methods and different types of glues and putting down painters tape and gluing things to the painters tape and everyone's gonna have their favorite method try them all out and see which one you like I like this method because it goes on really quick and easy and I can get to work and it holds it in place nicely when I'm done I need to take it off I can just use a card scraper and remove it it also gives you a little bit of wiggle room if you want to line things up and make them fit just right you have a little bit of time to work with it before it sets in what that's it's about five minutes and we'll come back and do some carving so for the actual carving I have it locked in here between dogs so it's held onto the bench nicely it doesn't move around much and then I'm going to actually start this off with two chisels so I have an 8 millimeter and a 12 millimeter which would be like a quarter and a half inch chisel and what I want to do is all of these lines I want to make a bit of a V cut following all of the lines around and that's just going to outline everything and then at that point you can decide how much you want to actually do this do you want to do some relief carving do you want to scoop in from the outside I'm going to show you some of that as we go along so for the v-groove all I'm going to do is I'm going to come along each of these lines and for the straight sections I can use this hold it an angle this way and then I can come around this section over here same thing opposite side the line hold it in from angle and just get that little chop out I've got a nice little line right there I'm going to do that on all of the straight sections just with the big pinch chisel but then when I come to these curves that really confuses people do I need a gouge well no you really don't need a gouge I'm going to use the corner of this chisel and I'm going to come in and just work around the corner with a small bench tickle here's a closer look I'm gonna come in with a corner here and I'm just gonna let run along let it slide a little bit and work in from the corner that way then I can come around this way and I can work in from this side as well just following that corner takes a little bit more time takes a little bit effort but eventually you'll be able to remove that chip and then you can come in through and just scratch it out a little bit and you're amazed at how that good this actually looks when you remove the paper backing now I'm doing a really thin line here and I'm actually sticking right to about the size of the printed line I usually I'm gonna make it a good bit bigger than that but to start with I'm gonna do it about this size and let me step back and take a look at it and then I'll know no I want to go a little bigger than that so then we can come in with this chisel back up a little and cut it a little bit larger always remember make it smaller so you can make it larger in the future because if you make it too big right off the bat then you're gonna have all kinds of problems trying to make it smaller so I'm gonna do this same method for a little while here working in around all of these tight corners and then I'm going to come back in with a V tool and show you how you can do it if you have something a little bit better than just a bench tickle but remember if you don't have a good set of carving chisels you don't have a reason to not do this because you can just do it with simple bench chisels when I probably did this type of carving for a good year or two before I went out and bought other chisels so you've been carving with a bench chisel for a while and you're looking for something a little bit different maybe something a little bit easier I'd actually think about getting a V tool and so this is basically a gouge but is shaped like a V a very very simple tool but it will do this type of carving incredibly fast so at this I can just freehand it dive in and then cut along just making sure not to go too fast or too far otherwise I'm going to blow out the other side and gouge out the wood like that what I generally do is I'll grab a small mallet or something of that nature got this one that I made for the kids I've got this one I have a video I worked on and then I've got a small shop Fox brass mallet that I'll use I can grab one of these start it in here this was very light taps this gives you a lot more control and ends up being a little bit faster at least for me I like doing it this way put it in at an angle lift up the chisel so you're diving in go down into your depth and then bring it into the cutting angle so you're riding that bevel so that the bottom of the edge of this bevel is parallel to the surface of the wood that what you're making the same depth to cut all the way across and then you've run around chasing these lines I'm not putting much of any force on it now it's just lightly tapping just with a little bit of movement and this actually gives you far more control than just doing it by hand because each tap is only going to move the chisel a little bit forward and you can control that amount of movement very easily without the chance of it going by but if you do want to learn the skill a little bit better you can learn to freehand it without flying through the end and chipping out like I did there earlier go to the V tool you can make these lines very quickly and very accurately I've actually had time with small kids I can show them this in five or six minutes they can do a pattern like this just about as quickly because it really doesn't take that much energy it doesn't take that much effort and if you can follow a line with a pencil you can follow it with a chisel the lines don't have to be perfect then you can see a lot of these are kind of squiggly and wavy but that really doesn't matter no one's ever gonna be able to see that just start on one end of the line and follow it around curving your body with it so you get your groove and just like that we finished out this pattern with a V tool like this this type of work is like four or five minutes worth of work to get this far we could call this project finished right here and peel off the pattern because we really don't need the pattern anymore I'll peel off as much as come easily then I'm gonna grab a card scraper and just slowly peel off all of these little bits and chunks [Music] one of the nice things about doing this way is you're right into your finishing step so if you're done you're using the card scraper to do the last finishing touches on it now it's ready for finish you're good to go but I want to do a little bit more embellishment in this other than just this basic pattern this is enough to make it stand out but I want to make it look a little bit more special than this so I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come back in here at the bench sizzle and I'm going to remove these small bits in between bevel down and just work it back and forth I'm kind of rocking the chisel back and forth till I get down to depth and I'm doing a bit of a relief carving here just want to clean up these edges a little bit come in from the other side and I'm just taking the surface of this down a little bit deeper with any of these edges sometimes I'm actually gonna come in here and trace the bottom of that V groove with a knife and that will sever all the fibers so I get a really nice clean look to it so just like that and this is about another five 10 minutes for the work we've done more of the relief work on this and you can see how it makes it pop out a good bit more and what we've basically done is we've outlined around every one of these lines except for on the outside so I want to do something a little more on there what I could do is come in here with a small bench chisel and I could make out small scallops like this and just kind of relieve this outside edge a little bit more or what I prefer to do is actually come in here with a small gouge this is a tiny little curved gouge and with this I can start back a little bit farther and I can make these scallops in the edge that just pop out a little bit more and so I can do this all the way around just keeping about the same distance away from the outside edge and I'm going to and I'm leaving these scallops here I'm not letting those pop off yet I'm just going to let them sit there when I come to a corner just going to work it around the corner with two or three scallops all coming into the corner time started on this you can see in this case I'm going across the grain just making sure I cut all the way across the fibers making sure my chisels are really nice and sharp sharp chisels are incredibly important especially here if you want to see how to sharpen gouges I have an entire video on that I'll try and leave a link to that down below we're just going to do this right around the outside it doesn't take very long at all and then coming in after scalloping all the way around just gonna have a knife in here and let this cut off all those little fibers that are sticking out I cut down a little bit deeper with the gouge and this will just sharpen up the edge and make it look that much better get rid of all those other pieces in there something like this may look very daunting to you it may look very scary it may look like this is something that's completely outside of your skill but I can guarantee you this will never be inside your skill until you give it a try try it on something you don't care about try it on something you don't worry you don't mind about grab some poplar or pine or something easy like that to carve this is walnut or cherry very easy woods to work with and you'd be surprised giving it a couple attempts you can do some pretty amazing things that people look at like wow you did that by hand and that's not a CNC it is a very very fun thing to do in this particular project for me was about 20-25 minutes even with the video work it's not my best work but I was just showing these simple ways of doing this it's not something it takes that much time and if I were starting off this would probably taken me an hour but if an hour's worth of carving like this into the body of a tool or something like that you're using all the time that just feels good it's something that is unique and special to that tool and something that just says handmade very very nice so if you don't have all of the carving tools don't worry with just a simple bench chisel you can get in here and do various much the same thing that's how I started that's how these were actually carved I only had a bench tizzle when I carved these it's not something that should hold you back now yes it is a lot of fun it does make things a little bit faster when you can get some individual gouges and if you want to see these specific ones I'll leave a link to those down below the Gau jizz that I really like you're not going to find cheap gouges that will treat you nicely bare minimum is like $30 a piece I think for my first one was like $35 for the cheapest v-tool I can find they're not cheap so you are gonna have to spend some money if you want something like this that's why a lot of times just using a bench chisel is very enjoyable so again if you do want to see links to these chisels I'll leave those down below so go on the shop have a little bit of fun experiment have some grab some scrap wood and just play around with it it's one of those things that you think I could never possibly do that until one day you suddenly did it and every time you do it it gets better and better and it's a skill that you can learn because you're just using a sharp edge on a piece of wood this is incredibly enjoyable so get out there have a bit of fun and try something out you might be surprised at what you're able to do I'll leave a link to a playlist with some other carving videos and things like that that you may find enjoyable this is one of the things that I absolutely love and it is a great way to spend some time to relax to enjoy put on some music grab your favorite carving tool and make something magic come out of the wood now this is basic carving this is this is a good way to get into it there's a lot of things where you can start getting into relief carvings and some artistic carvings and other things like that but once you get the basic idea with this you'll see that oh I could try this and I could try that and the whole world suddenly starts to open up for you so dive in have some fun don't be afraid just enjoy the process mistakes will come but that's where you can put the happy little trees so I hope you like this video this was a fun one for me if you do have any questions ideas thoughts let me know those down below also if you want to see the links to the tools and other videos on the topic I'll have those down below in the description as well if you did like the video please hit like comment share and subscribe all those things really do help out the channel and they mean a lot to me they really keep this channel going so thank you for that I think that's about it for today and until next time have a wonderful day this really brings new meaning to carving the turkey

Channel: Wood By Wright How 2

Views: 219,957

Rating: 4.9410462 out of 5

Keywords: How to carve, Carving, basic tools, Biginner carving, Wood By Wright, wood By Wright 2, Hand tools, Handtools, Woodworking, beginner woodworking, diy, handtool woodworking, Uri Tuchman, woodworking project, woodworking projects, easy woodworking, woodworking skills, celtic knot, easy carving, celtic weave, woodworking techniques, Hardwoods, How To, weave, Carve, carveing, Chisel, Gouge, Knife, v tool, woodworking hand tools, wood working tools

Id: oSxxv4YwGZw

Length: 14min 43sec (883 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019