how to paint your wood carvings

Wood carvings can be left in their natural wood coloring by using polyurethane, varnish, or oil finishes.  But by adding coloration with oil, watercolors, or acrylic paintings can bring a new dimension to your finished work.

Our Hen and Rooster relief wood carving is a great beginner’s carving project as it uses simple layers and rounded over edges.  Because it pattern, Hens and Rooster Pattern Package at ArtDesignsStudio.com, is a stylized design you can add both fine and deep detailing using the stop cut or a v-gouge cut.  To bring the detail of the carving to the forefront I dry brushed this carving with acrylic paints over an oil stain.  To learn more about how to paint your wood carving, please visit any of the links below, posted here on our blog.

Hen and Rooster Relief Wood CarvingPainting & Coloring
Coloring Your Project
Adding Skin Colors
Basics to Painting
Acrylics over a Primer
China Painting with Acrylics
Dry Brushed Acrylics
Marbling & Splatter Painting
Simple Dry Brushing
Vintage Painting
Painting Supplies
Paint Kit Supplies for Painting
Steps to Success, Painting
Burnishing Your Wood Carving
Simple Blending Acrylic Paints
Techniques for Painting
Basics to Painting
Painting Eyes
Watercolors & Wood Burning
The Color Wheel
Dry Brushing

 Discount Alert
Art Designs Studio
3/07 through 3/15, 2015

Use our discount code this week is  facebook  at ArtDesignsStudio.com for $5 off that can be used for each Cane, Walking Stick, and Wizard Wands Pattern Packs or E-Projects above.  Save up to $20 on your next wood spirit carving project! Good through March 15, 2015.

Learn how to whittle fish decoys
For our Facebook friends that are stopping by the blog, folk art fish decoy carving is a great first carving project.  Wood Carving Fish Decoys  will take you through the easy step-by-step process of whittling your very first folk art fish decoy.

Read More »

Twistie Stick Snake Carving by Lora Irish

Cane, walking stick, and wizard wand wood carving

Discount Alert
Art Designs Studio
3/07 through 3/15, 2015

To learn more about Wood Spirit Facial Plane carvings, check out our E-Project – Wood Spirit Mushroom Carving E-Project – which takes you through all of the steps to create the facial planes, plus gives you eight full sized 3D patterns.  If you want to focus on the Wood Spirit face, check out Wood Spirit Carving E-Project, which takes you through the face carving as well as how to paint your wood spirit walking stick.

Just are looking for new ideas, browse through the Canes, Walking Sticks & Wizard Wands Pattern Package with 48 full-sized 3D patterns or our classic Cane Handles & Walking Sticks Patterns with 38 patterns.

Use our discount code – facebook – for ArtDesignsStudio.com for $5 off that can be used for each Cane, Walking Stick, and Wizard Wands Pattern Packs or E-Projects above.  Save up to $20 on your next wood spirit carving project!

Free Online Walking Stick Carving Projects

Cane and walking stick wood carvingIntroduction to Cane Carving
Wood Spirit and Green Man Wood Carving
Walking Stick Joinery
Walking Stick Wood – Harvesting Sticks
Walking Stick – Adding Extras
Walking Stick – Clamping Your Handle
Day 1 Twistie Stick Snake Cane Carving
Day 2 Twistie Stick Snake Cane Carving
Day 3 Twistie Stick Snake Cane Carving
Day 4 Twistie Stick Snake Cane Carving
Day 5 Twistie Stick Snake Cane Carving
Free Mountain Man Cane Carving Pattern

The patterns for the canes, shown right,
are available at Art Designs Studio,
L S Irish’s pattern website,
CP136 Canes, Walking Sticks, & Wizard Wands

Read More »

cane, walking stick, and wizard wand carving

Wood Spirit Cane and Walking Stick Carving

As a new wood carver you would think that the classic wood spirit face would be difficult to create.  Yet, it is one of the simplest, method-technique topics that wood carvers and whittlers can work.

Wood carving the wood spirit face
Face carvings, as the wood spirit, or as shown above as a Mushroom Wood Spirit, begins with a series of simple angled cuts to establish the planes in the face. These planes create the depth, width, and feature areas as the rise of the eyebrow ridge, the deep set of the nose bridge, and the angle and slant of the mouth.

wood carving the wood spirit
Where you create the planes and angles determines the finished look of the face.  In this sample the nose plane is exaggerated and the eye depth plane is minimized.  When the shaping steps are done, this Mushroom spirit has an extra long nose that fills up the needed space to create the mushroom stem.

To learn more about Wood Spirit Facial Plane carvings, check out our E-Project – Wood Spirit Mushroom Carving E-Project – which takes you through all of the steps to create the facial planes, plus gives you eight full sized 3D patterns.  If you want to focus on the Wood Spirit face, check out Wood Spirit Carving E-Project, which takes you through the face carving as well as how to paint your wood spirit walking stick.

If you are an advanced wood carver and just are looking for new ideas, browse through the Canes, Walking Sticks & Wizard Wands Pattern Package with 48 full-sized 3D patterns or our classic Cane Handles & Walking Sticks Patterns with 38 patterns.

And, if you stop by our new Facebook page you will discover a discount code for ArtDesignsStudio.com for $5 off that can be used for each of the Pattern Packs or E-Projects above.  Save up to $20 on your next wood spirit carving project!

Wood Spirit Cane and Walking Stick Carving Read More »

Mule Deer Wood Carving Relief Project

The complete Mule Deer Wood Carving Relief Project, with the step by step instructions, free patterns, and painting steps is now posted here on LSIrish.com.  Please drop me an email if you have any questions, or feedback on this in-depth free project by clicking of the Contact Us link in the top right ofthe nav bar.

How to dry brush paint a relief wood carving

 

Mule Deer Wood Carving Relief Project Read More »

Stop Cuts and Rough Out Steps in Relief Wood Carving

The stop cut is a two-stroke bench knife cut that frees a v-shaped trough along a pattern line. A round, flat, or bull nose chisel is then used to cut the wood in the lower level of the design, sliding the chisel into the stop cut. When the chisel edge meets the stop cut a clean sliver of wood is released without damaging the higher level. Today we are going to look at the steps used to create a stop cut and to do basic rough out work in your relief wood carvings.

Stop Cuts in Relief Wood CarvingBegin by tracing your pattern to the wood blank. Because you will be cutting away background wood and dropping areas of the pattern into different levels or depths in the blank you need only trace the outlines of each area. All detail tracing will be lost during the rough out stage.

The pattern shown here, the Mule Deer Buck, is an in-depth tutorial that is posted at FamilyWoodworking.org and WoodworkingChat.com.  These are two great, online message boards where wood carvers and woodworkers can share their ideas, experiences, and techniques.

 

Stop Cut

The two strokes of a stop cut in relief wood carving1.  The stop cut is a two-step stroke.  Begin by laying your bench knife vertically along the outside edge of your pattern line.  Pull a shallow cut following the pattern line.

2.  Move the tip of your bench knife a small amount of space away from your first cut.  Angle the knife tip towards the first cut.  Pull a shallow cut, maintaining that small space between the knife tip and the first cut.

3.  The two cuts will release a thin, shallow v-shaped chip of wood.  The chip will leave a straight wall along the pattern line and an angled wall in the background area of the pattern.

 

 

 

Stop cuts in relief wood carving4.  You can deepen a stop cut by re-cutting, using the same steps, several times.  This ‘walks’ the v-shaped trough deeper into the wood.

5.  Stop cuts may also be created using a v-gouge.  The v-gouge makes both the straight wall cut and the slanted side cut in one stroke.   The g-gouge works exceptionally well when you are creating stop cuts that flow with the grain of the wood.  For tight areas in a pattern, as the small openings in the feathers in the pattern shown, you may find that the bench knife will provide more control.

 

 

Rough Cutting into a Stop Cut

Wide Sweep Gouge in Rugh Cutting a Wood Carving1.  You can use a round gouge, straight chisel, or bull nose chisel to rough cut a background area that has been stop cut at the pattern line.  I prefer a large, wide-sweep round gouge for my first rough-out cuts.  The wide-sweep takes a shallow but wide chip of wood with each cut.  That allows me to slowly drop the depth of an area while taking a large chip of wood with each cut.

2.  Start you cut about 3/8″ to 3/4″ from the stop cut in the background area.  Move the chisel or gouge edge towards the stop cut, slowly deepening the cut as you work.  Stop when your gouge reaches the stop cut.  I usually cut a series of gouge cuts, that slightly overlap.

 

 

Releasing a rough cut gouge stroke with a bench knife.3.  Make a shallow, vertical cut, using your bench knife along the pattern line to release any gouge chips that are still connected to the wood.

4.  Alternate your stop cuts with your gouge rough-out cuts to slowly drop the background area to your desired depth in the wood.

5.  The background area that has been gouge rough cut will at this stage will slowly taper from the original level of the wood at its most distant point in the cut from the pattern line to the your desired depth at the stop cut.  Later in any relief carving you can work the remaining background areas down to the same depth.

Practice Board Exercise

Relief wood carving knife cuts1.  Practice boards allow you to try, learn, and experiment with new cuts before you use them in your latest projects.  In this sample the reverse side on an older basswood plaque was used as my practice board.  I marked the board into 1 1/2″ squares, creating small spaces to experiment with different relief carving cuts.  For the stop cut and rough out practice I used a medicine jar cap to draw a half-circle as my pattern line. Begin your practice square by making the two-stroke stop cut using a bench knife or a large chip carving knife.

 

Stop cut made with a bench knife3.  You can see in the sample photo how this two-stroke cut releases a long v-shaped wood chip.

 

 

 

 

Freeing a rough cut chip from a stop cut.4.  Use your round gouge, straight chisel, or bull nose chisel to begin removing the wood in the background area of the design, working from the outer edges of the wood blank into the stop cut line.  With your bench knife cut along the stop cut, holding the knife in a vertical position, to free any rough cut chips.

Alternate making stop cuts and working rough out cuts to slowly drop the depth of the background elements in the design.

 

practice pattern for stop cuts in relief wood carving5.  Here is the stop cut and rough out cuts used in a small practice pattern.

 

 

 

Stop Cuts and Rough Out Steps in Relief Wood Carving Read More »

Scroll to Top