What are common mistakes to avoid in wood carving

The mistake underneath nearly all the common mistakes to avoid in wood carving is carving with a dull tool. I have made most of the others in front of a camera. My teacher said it plainer than I can. There is no such a thing as a bad wood. Only dull tools.

You started with a sharp knife and a drawing you liked. Then the wood began to fight, and a piece broke away in the one place you needed whole. I know that feeling. At six years old I killed my grandfather's chisel on a brick, and I still slip on camera.

Several hundred gouges on the wall behind me, one basswood panel under my hands.

Below is the list that actually costs people their work. Name, cause, fix. And then the part almost nobody writes down, which is what to do after the slip. All of it comes down to one disagreement with wood as a material.

• A dull edge causes most of what beginners blame on bad wood or bad grain.
• Grab the biggest tool that fits the space.
• Slice sideways instead of pushing the blade in, because a slice carves clean.
• Every carving is an art of deduction, and what you remove never comes back.
• After a break there are three roads out. Glue, recarve, or absorb the damage into a bigger shape.

---

Which mistake causes all the others?

A dull edge causes almost everything else on this list. Press harder, get a rough surface, tire out faster, then blame the board. My teacher heard me do exactly that.

When I started to carve I came to him one day and said, why did you give me that bad piece of wood? And he said, there is no such a thing as a bad wood. It is dull tools. That is the only problem, dull tools. Sharp tools can do beautiful stuff, even on the worst of the worst.

A hand on the centre nut of the flat honing wheel.

He qualified it later. Of course some species are almost impossible to carve. But complain about walnut, or cherry, or basswood, or lime wood, and your tool is the problem, not the board. Density at the edge is its own subject, covered in what the gravity of wood means. Reading how sharpening works pays for itself.

People buy carving tools, carve for a month, the edge dies, and frustration arrives. They blame the wood. Or themselves. So sharpening opens my school rather than closing it, which is why my sharpening course comes first.

I lay a gouge flat on the honing disc, steadying the blade.

Sharp is not a state. Sharpening runs on a schedule. Buy sharp tools and they do not last, and it is never an if, only a when. A brand new tool holds for a couple of days, three days, and then I reshape it.

With a dead edge, do not even try. You will cut yourself. Dull steel forces far more pressure out of your arm. The word you meet here is the razor strop, and the rest of it lives on the sharpening pages.

Three gouges of one sweep, no hands in frame.

In your first month, the page on common wood carving mistakes beginners make covers the starter list. This page is the whole career, and it carries the recovery.

Do I have to carve with the grain?

Not always, and a sharp edge is what makes that choice yours. I teach the grain rule, then where it breaks. A Grinling Gibbons flower makes you attack from several angles.

Day one is too early. I wait until day three, after people have felt the wood fight them.

Think about a handful of drinking straws, rubbed one way and then the other. One side is easier. Or go pet a dog backwards and watch what happens.

The handle stays down so the blade does not dive.

So one side carves clean and the other splits and comes out rough. What is the solution? Turn around and attack from the far side, when the piece is wide enough. But you just carved the same place twice and paid double the time. And what is the real solution? Sharp tools. Break the rules.

Carve in Grinling Gibbons style and the rule dies. Absolutely no. You have to attack from some angles. How can you find the grain then? The only solution is just to keep your tools sharp, and that is the only solution.

Then comes a marriage line, if you can call it that, my name for the place where two grain directions meet inside one board. Picture a bowl. You start carving, the direction turns, and now you come at it from the far side or you split it. So you have to attack from both sides.

Chalk makes the modelling read on dark walnut while a thin blade lays in one fine line.

In class I have said long grain and short grain, stopped myself, and said, I mean with the grain and against the grain, I am sorry. On a closed shape nobody finds where the short grain is, so the terminology quits on you.

Meanwhile I work the hard direction calmly. One lesson has me saying I am working against the grain here, which in this case I guess is okay, not a big deal. Direction barely matters there, because I am slicing and my tool is absolutely sharp.

The background at right has torn rather than sheared. Too much pressure leaves that behind, and it is a pressure failure, not a grain failure.

A page here argues for carving in the direction of the grain, and on a flat board it is the right first rule. Read it as the rule, and this section as what the rule does on a deep flower. Mechanics live in handling different grain directions and why wood grain matters for carving, plus how grain forms in a tree and hardwood anatomy.

Keep it simple, and do not overcomplicate things. I tell a story about a pen in space. People say it is a legend, and I tell it anyway, because the lesson in it is right. NASA had a pen that leaked without gravity, and after years and millions of taxpayer dollars they invented a nitrogen driven pen. Russians used a pencil. Wood fighting you means sharpen.

---

Why does a small tool make the work take so long?

A small tool removes a small amount of wood, and the clock does not care how careful you were. I see this constantly, in beginners and in carvers of many years. They grab something tiny and zig and zig and zig, and get frustrated.

Three sizes, pretty much, the way I divide them.

The biggest tool that fits goes first on a molding panel.

A huge tool is like an airplane. Anything is possible with it. Three quarters of an inch is like driving, which still arrives and takes a lot longer.

A small tool also arrives. It takes about forever, like ten years, and then you say, oh, that took me ten years. Done it myself. One piece kept me busy for ten years when a month would have finished it.

The design is drawn on paper glued to the blank, and the first passes take the field down around it.

So keep this in mind, always. Bigger tool available? Grab the bigger tool. Always. Reach for a medium only when the big one no longer fits, and save the smallest of the smallest for details. Bought sets run small to medium, which is why this mistake is so common.

Two tools in hand over the oval blank, shavings heaped up.

Still shopping? Read what to look for in a carving tool set, the best materials for beginners in wood carving, and what is needed to carve wood. A gouge curves, a chisel is flat.

Am I pushing the tool when I should be slicing?

Push the blade straight in and you are wedging the wood apart. In person, this is the biggest mistake I see. A slice travels sideways while it goes down, a small rotation of the hand, and the surface changes.

People place the tool and shove. Possible, when the steel is sharp, but the finish will not look as nice and tiredness arrives much quicker. So it is always better to slice it. Always better slice it.

The blade travels sideways between two grapes instead of being pushed straight in.

One more place invites a shove, and it has a name in my classes. The connection point, where two shapes meet in a little triangle. Do not place your tool at 90 degrees there. That is a mistake. Mine always goes on an angle, maybe 45 degrees or so. Lots of people just push in, and it is a big wedge.

The reference photo is glued right to the block.

Real life hides those connections, so the temptation is to drop straight down. Think about how you will clean inside those triangles afterwards. Carving is a little more about stylizing than about the reality of life. And do not make the triangles too small, which is another common mistake.

Let me name which cut I mean, because 90 degrees straight down is also a real technique I use on purpose. A stop cut goes vertically, and my beginner course opens with exactly that, across the grain on a plain strip of basswood. The mistake lives only at the connection point, where a vertical wall leaves a corner nobody can clean later.

Anywhere else, ease off. Too much force damages the background, and repairing that is miserable. For other voices, Fine Woodworking and Popular Woodworking publish on hand technique, while relief carving and chip carving are worth reading early. Technique gets its own page in how to improve your carving technique.

How deep should the first pass go?

Shallower than you want. Going deeper later is always available, and too deep too soon puts me in trouble.

Keep your handle down. Raise it and the blade dives, so the carving goes too deep at the beginning, and cleaning that up is hard. Press and wiggle straight down. Do not force it.

Layout lines in red and blue still show through the chips as the blade goes deeper.

Undercutting runs on the same clock. Wait until a full barrel, a full block, is visible. Oh, I made a mistake, too early for undercutting, but it is okay. Depth training is why that first exercise exists in First Cuts for Beginners.

Little by little, both directions, without forcing. Probably the biggest mistake some people make is forcing, trying to rush, thinking speed at the start buys speed at the end.

My finger marks the lobe that went past the line.

Here I have to walk something back, because I walked it back on camera myself. Removing as much as you can in one pass is one of the biggest mistakes wood carvers do, I said, and then stopped in the same breath. I should not call it a mistake. Some carvers really rely on speed, and so do I. But still, quality cannot suffer. Big tool for the volume, little by little for the finish carving.

Where should my hands and my tools be?

Your holding hand belongs behind the blade, never in front of it. First rule I give a raw beginner. And yes, I have broken it. Some days I remember cutting myself over 100 times, and that was a complicated carving.

Carving toward yourself is always dangerous, because slipping means poking yourself. Never place your hand in front of your knife, even while holding the piece down.

The holding hand stays behind the blade, on a small basswood practice board.

Then a student changed my mind. One of them was a dentist, and a dentist knows how to lock hands, so he showed me, and I thought that is an excellent technique. He locked his hand flat and used just the palms. Locked like that, slipping is almost impossible.

The grip a dentist taught me, with the supporting hand locked flat instead of hanging.

So carving toward yourself becomes possible. A locked hand, rather than one hanging in the air, is safe, and you still have to be really careful. Even so, anybody uncomfortable with it should please not try.

Wood carvers cut themselves. Mine did not happen because I was careless. The nature of carving is it. Good technique pulls the odds down, and as far as I can tell it never takes them to zero. More in the dangers of wood carving for beginners, while the OSHA woodworking eTool covers the shop side.

People ask about gloves. In my shop the gloves protect the wood. Cheap white rubber ones keep the surface clean, and I say the rest out loud in the lesson. They will not protect your hands. Wearing them I cannot grab my handle or feel the tool, so most of the time I skip them.

Now the bench, which I can read from a photograph. Show me a picture of one and I can tell whether this carver is professional or only calling himself professional, purely by where the tools lie.

One gouge on the bench with the lesson's own rule on screen.

Lay each tool with the edge toward yourself. Some people do the opposite out of fear, and then the sweep is invisible, because not every maker marks it.

Spacing matters too. Leave room between tools, because a hand needs somewhere to land. About half a thousand tools live in my shop, so putting them all out would lose me. Two, three, five at the most stay near me.

Edge toward you, space between them, and only a few tools out at a time.

A messy bench tells me one more thing. Scattered tools mean he is tired, and that happens to professional people too. Every 20 minutes is good practice, because the brain tires first and tired brains put tools down badly.

Holding the work is simpler than most expect. Some kind of clamps will hold that piece down, and mine is a simple clamping system. No workshop at home? Your kitchen table will do, and lots of my projects have been done on one. Longer version in what to look for in a carving bench, and the tools course shows mine.

The beginner setup. A flat blank, a bench with dog holes, one knife, one pencil.

---

What do I do after I have already slipped?

Put the tool down first. On camera I have said it more than once. I will leave it for now, I will think what I can do to fix it. Glue, recarve, or a bigger shape.

David Esterly wrote a book called The Lost Carving, and he put our whole trade into one line.

They live in a world permeated by error.

Here is an hour of me carving live, in a session I called Did I fail?

Step 1, stop the tool and set it down

Stopping comes first, and saying it out loud comes second, because the class is watching. Oops, I made a mistake. I slipped. I created a cut I did not want to create. No bueno. Then it sits there, untouched, while I think about what comes next.

Step 2, name what actually went wrong

On a hazelnut panel I realized the mistake, and it was space. Not enough left for the husk, and a husk has to wrap the individual nuts. That was the layout, not the tool.

Step 3, glue the broken piece back where it came from

Pretty much glue. Nothing about it has ever been more complicated. My small bottle sits on the bench, and back the piece goes if it needs to. Has this happened to me? Absolutely. Absolutely. I broke some stuff, and what can you do.

The repair happens on the bench, mid-lesson, with the bottle I keep within arm's reach.

The broken sliver goes back into its own socket.

Step 4, carve the shape again instead of gluing it

Sometimes I do not want the glue. Once, on a Venetian panel, I broke the edge and said so on the spot. Already broke it. Did not want to glue it back. Recreate the shape. So it got carved again out of what remained.

Recutting the shape, not gluing it.

Step 5, make the mistake into a bigger shape

And sometimes the answer is more shape, not less. An eye went wrong on me once, and I said, that is not bueno, now I have to fix it somehow or create a bigger eye. A design can bend. Wood cannot come back. Holding a weak piece together is covered in stabilizing thin wood carvings.

When a shape goes wrong there is sometimes a bigger shape hiding inside it.

Which mistakes cannot be fixed?

The ones where you took away wood you needed. Carving is an art of deduction. Once you deduct, that does not come back, and I have never found a way around it. Some stuff glues back, and many times you really cannot.

So what happens when you break something? Well, better not to break. Rushing multiplies mistakes, and repairs eat far more time than the rush ever saved.

Tempting, I know, to finish everything in half an hour. Ours is not that type of trade. One of my works took a few years to finish. A few years. Woodcarving is probably the most time involving trade in woodworking, and believe me, it can beat building a really nice piece of furniture.

The drawn line and the carved shape side by side, on a board chalked white.

The fix for an unfixable mistake happens before the mistake. On that hazelnut panel plenty of material was still there. About one inch, approximately, maybe a little less, but about maybe 25 or 24 millimeters. That inch was the only way back.

Supports work the same way. Keep that bridge to the end, because undercutting brings a tendency to crank on it and use it as leverage. Remove it too soon and the grain runs that direction, so it goes weak and you break it. I broke one on camera. Not the end of the world, and exactly why I had kept it.

Thin glue soaks into the fragile part before it breaks, not after.

Breaks can also be stopped before they start. Fragile parts get stabilized with super glue, really thin, by Starbond. Liquidy, so it penetrates all the way through. Of course breaking is still possible, just a lot harder.

David Esterly put the hard part better than I can, in The Lost Carving.

No one learns the cost of violating the rules of succession more painfully than those in the subtractive arts.

To read around the trade, the wood carving entry and The Wood Database articles are solid, WOODWEB covers the shop side, and the Heritage Crafts red list tracks which crafts are at risk. Why carving takes so long for beginners explains the clock.

Which mistakes are not my fault?

The notch in your V-tool is one of them. That tool gives the most headaches, and length of experience changes nothing. Actually that is a manufacturer's fault, and there is a way to deal with it.

Getting really consistent thickness on both sides of a V-tool is almost impossible, whether the most expensive CNC machine made it or a smith forged it by hand. Keep in mind it is three tools in one. Understand that and the problem stops being a problem, because now you sharpen it as three tools in one.

A close look at the inside corner of a V-tool.

A parting tool was never in every wood carver's arsenal anyway, and in Europe it stayed uncommon until roughly the 19th century. Yours fights you? You are in old company.

Somebody always asks whether a power tool is the fix. Somebody on a livestream asked me about a Dremel and the other ones like it. I do not. Two reasons. Electric tools save no time at all, running about the same speed as my hands, and sanding afterwards eats a lot more of your day. Second, dust. Gouges and chisels create none of it, and whoever does sand should read OSHA on wood dust before setting up in a basement.

Three gouge blades side by side, a marker tip on the middle bevel.

Sandpaper draws the same question, and my answer splits two ways, which I would rather admit than hide. Sandpaper leaves abrasive inside of the wood fibers and your tool becomes dull really quickly, so I would not use it. Like true masters, they never used the sandpaper in the past. And then one lesson of mine ends with yes, it is absolutely okay to sand a thing. It all depends on the finish and on the application. Both answers belong to me.

What did my master fix before I ever touched the wood?

My drawing. The first thing he did was hand me a piece of paper and a pencil. Design, he said. Design what you are going to carve. Then he walked away.

All day long went into a beautiful acanthus leaf, or so I thought. He came back, looked at the paper, and said, boom, think. And I did not understand that. He said, think how you going to carve it. Piece of paper is not piece of wood. Then two questions. What tools you going to use? How many tools do you have?

The drawing that comes before any wood, and the question it has to answer.

Design has to sit on your ability, on your army. Every tool is a soldier and does its own function. Bigger army, bigger area to conquer. Two guys on your side, and you are limited. Deepest mistake on the page, because it lands before a shaving comes off, and how to sketch a carving design goes further.

All he gave me was the first knife, and he taught me to use it in every carving. Then came a gouge. You have to master knife before you are going to get to the gouge, he said. Cannot master knife? No gouge from me. That was an old European apprenticeship, the kind the old craft guilds ran.

The Swiss made knife I have kept for twenty years, held up over the bench.

Multiple knives live in my shop, and this one is the favorite. Number 12, Swiss made. Expensive, but worth it. Twenty years on my shelf, and still in my hand every day. A one time investment, but a lifetime friend.

Cheaper options exist. They are not going to last you as long. Either quality got sacrificed, or the metal is unstable and it breaks easily. My suggestion is to buy a really good tool from the beginning. Cheap does not always mean bad, and I have reviewed budget knives I rate well, with metal thick enough for a different job than this one. Shops like Lee Valley Tools carry them. The general woodworking and softwood entries cover the rest.

One more mistake arrives by email. What level am I going to become in one month? And in two months? What am I going to achieve in a year? Impossible to tell, because all of it depends on you and only you, and on the progress only you do. The first step in wood carving is where I would send him.

Young kids at the gym do the same thing. One day of exercise, pumping dumbbells, then walking to the mirror to see whatever grew on the biceps. Growing that bicep in one day is impossible. Don't be like a child. More you carve, more you see, and deeper you go, deeper you see.

One long clean pass around the eye of an acanthus scroll, layout pencil still on the board.

Robert Greene put the same thing in four words in his book Mastery.

Apprentice yourself in failure

And I have done it, many times over. I guess you also have to cut yourself sometimes, and that way you will understand and learn from your own mistakes. Still deciding whether this work suits you? Is wood carving hard and how long it takes to learn to carve wood are both honest about it, and why carving is worth taking up makes the other case.

---

Every lesson here was paid for with a broken piece, usually by me. Sharpening comes first at the school, then the knife, then the gouge. Many of the lessons quoted on this page come from the techniques and questions course. To see where to begin, the starting page for the school lays it out, and what kind of wood to use for carving answers the question that comes next.

Shall we carve?