Introduction
Welcome to my Beginner Essential Guide for wood carving for beginners. This guide will focus on manual carving with (full size) gouges and a mallet. I might include a chapter on power carving with burrs, whittling or chip carving (with knives) but the focus will be on manual carving with gouges. The biggest advantage over power carving in my opinion is the relaxing effect, less noise and a lot less dust and debris when you’re done.
Before we get to the fun stuff, we will go over some theory first, but I’ll try and keep it short and sweet. My goal is to get more people started into the wonderful world of wood carving. There are some basics you will need to know and some tools you will need to start. That will take up the first few chapters, but after that it will mostly be exercises and demonstrations to aid in explaining a specific topic.
I will include lots of pictures and some short video to demonstrate the key points of the theory and show you how I would do it.
