Crafting Wooden Gifts: How to Carve a Cute Little Mushroom
In this post we continue to take you through the process of learning to carve fun and great looking wooden gifts. Using the mushroom wood figurine that has appeared in previous posts as an example, we'll take you through a variety of carving techniques as we go along.
The first step is to smooth out the areas that were not smooth enough when we cut the prototype. This step involves making small cuts on the sides of the mushroom figurine along the contour line, using the “push carving” technique that we talked about in the previous tutorials.
As you can see in the picture, you should start from the edge and cut as thinly as possible to avoid ruining the piece by cutting too much at once. The direction of the cut should be against the grain of the wood or perpendicular to the grain. We need to sharpen the mushroom wood figurine as round as possible, and we can regularly turn it over to the front side and compare it to the previously drawn contour lines.
Once the top of the mushroom has been cut, we cut the bottom of the mushroom in the same way, cutting to the point of demarcation by first cutting off the conduit of the wood and just letting it fall quite naturally. We then proceeded to round the edges of the wood from the side.
We are still fixing the overall shape of the wooden gift in this step, so you should look at the whole more than just the localized details as you chip away.
Once we have rounded the mushroom tip enough as well, we need to do some edge trimming, as shown in the picture, its edge should go back towards the recovery instead of being completely vertical, this kind of action will make the wooden gift look more lovely and not look too dull.
Okay, let's take another look at the initial sketch of the mushroom wood figurine we found. From the front, the mushroom tip is protruding out on both sides, giving it a bulbous shape, which suggests that it could still be tucked inward near the root.
We cut a stop-carve so that it ends here, and then chipped it to allow the excess wood to fall naturally. Make another push carve, still letting the wood chips fall naturally. We keep repeating the same movement around the mushroom, making each cut as clean and crisp as possible, letting the chips fall as naturally as possible so as not to leave small splinters. If we leave a small splinter after each cut, as we make more and more cuts, we will end up with a very large number of splinters in this mushroom figurine, which is not what we want.
At this point we'll stop and look at the state of the mushroom now, as we've just made one cut it's already looking a little bit more inward, but we still want to make it a little bit thinner, we'll continue to make more cuts inward.
This is the end of this post, in the following posts we will continue to take you through this lovely mushroom wooden figurine, it is a relatively simple piece, very suitable for beginners to practice their carving skills and is suitable for all kinds of wooden gifts. We hope this process will bring you reward and joy.
