Learning to carve wooden gifts: Tips for using a carving knife

Hello everyone, today we explain the techniques and tips for carving wooden gifts with a carving knife. There are three main ways to sharpen wood, which are pushing, pulling, and cutting. Even if you are a wood carving beginner, if you can use these three methods skillfully, then you can carve any shape of wooden gifts.

Pushing technique

As shown in the picture, we use a piece of light wood demonstration, one hand holding the knife, the other hand half holding the wood block, the thumb of the hand holding the wood block pressed on the carving knife, the thumb pushed forward to drive the carving knife forward to sharpen, this is the push technique. Please note that the hand holding the knife (left hand in the picture) does not exert any force, only the thumb (right hand) pushes forward.

A wrong demonstration is that if your index finger (the right index finger in the picture) is in front of the block of wood, when your thumb pushes forward with force, it is very likely to injure your index finger by mistake, so please do not put your index finger in the position in front of the carving knife. Pushing is easy if you practice a lot, and this is the primary way to chip wood.

Pulling technique

The second method is to pull back, which is the opposite of the first forward push. Hold the carving knife in one hand while the thumb of this hand (left hand in the picture) is pressed against the bottom of the block of wood and the hand holding the knife pulls back and forth and down. This point should pay attention to the direction of the force of the hand, pull to which position to stop you should be able to control at any time, not too much force, if too much force will hurt the thumb. As shown in the figure, if you want to cut to a certain position, you can stop; cut in a different position, you can still stop at any time; all cuts can also be. The power of this method is that the thumb of the hand holding the knife is pressed on the bottom of the block, forming an angle with the other fingers, and the magnitude of the cut is controlled by the index finger by pushing back and forth.

Cutting technique

As the name suggests, cutting is to insert the knife into the wood, why do we use the cutting technique? Because sometimes you need to cut the wood fiber to make the character clothing folds, texture or some special surface. When using the cutting technique, please master the strength, not too hard to cut too deep and destroy the whole work. As shown in the picture, when cutting, you need to insert the knife twice into the wood adjacent to the position, cut out a corner, that is, the indentation.

Summarize

In this blog post we have explained to the wood carving beginner the use of three kinds of carving knife skills, please refer to the dynamic diagram, skillful mastery of them is enough to let you easily carve any wooden gifts.