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Interested in wood carving, but don’t know where to start?
Can’t find any helpful articles that give detailed and thorough explanations to all of your questions?
Then you have come to the right place!
This article will be a guide to all the information you will need right here in Best Wood Carving Tools website.
How to get started
Most of us have varying stories on how we all started carving, but the important thing is that everyone here has the desire to learn and create. But before you can start creating anything, you must first understand the styles of woodcarving.
Choose carving style and tools
Whittling (hand carving): Mainly uses whittling knives and is meant for carving shapes, figures, and utensils. This is the most popular style of woodcarving, mostly because it is significantly easier to learn and cheap to purchase tools. There are specialty tools you can purchase to compliment your primary knife, like hook knives which are used for shaping wooden spoons. However, they are not at all necessary at this point when we are taking baby steps to get started.
Relief Carving: This style utilizes gouges and chisels to carve objects into a piece of wood, typically the end result is a picture. This is a bit more of a methodical style because the techniques are different, tools are different, and it tends to be less forgiving when mistakes are made.
Chip Carving: Another wood carving style is called chip carving. This technique is used to create symmetrical and geometrical designs in wood planks by literally chipping out material.
Wood to carve
I always suggest basswood to anyone who hasn’t had any experience carving other types of wood. It is the best wood to begin with while learning new techniques and carving styles.
Basswood is rather forgiving to those who don’t completely know what they’re doing. Since it is a softwood, it is very easy to cut material of wood from it while not straining your tools too much.
If you were to use hardwood, you would notice right away how much more difficult it is to cut. Not only this but you will need to sharpen your equipment much more frequently as well.
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