Follow My Carving - Gnarly - Step 6

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.


A shallow gouge is used to round over the edges of each limb. It is preferable to make two or three shallow passes instead of one deep pass. Care must be taken to not put too much pressure on the smaller branches or they could break. Because this is on the backside of the carving, great accuracy is not important. The point is to round the edge so a square edge cannot be seen from the front.

More is carved away from the larger limbs and less from the smaller branches or where they meet the edge of the border. Leaving more wood in these areas keeps them from becoming too fragile.

A little less than half the thickness of the branch is carved away. The extra depth left on the front side is needed to carve detail into those areas, especially on the smaller branches. The edges of the border will not be rounded and will remain square on both sides.

The next installment is coming soon.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Follow My Carving - Step 5 - Gnarly

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.


Cutting with the scroll saw blade can leave fuzzy edges on the backside. These will be removed when the edges are rounded.

Changing direction with the blade can also leave rough edges, or sides that don’t meet perfectly in the tight V areas where the branches converge.

To smooth these areas, a rotary tool with a needle-type bit is used. It acts like a precision sander. For best results, this cleanup process is done from the backside with the tool spinning at low speed. The tip always has to be in motion when in contact with the wood to keep from creating a round indentation in the wood.

In next installment, the edges of the branches will be rounded.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Follow My Carving - Gnarly Tree - Step 4

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.













Before the paper pattern is removed, several stop cuts are made with a carving knife and gouge. These are special cuts that help define areas and stop carving strokes from going through one area into another.

To give the branches dimensionality and help create the illusion that they are coming forward, short cuts are made where they change direction from the main limb. These areas will later be undercut, which will add to the illusion.

The outer circle frame of the tree is also outlined with the carving knife. This cut will later be enhanced with a small carving gouge. The space between the tree and this outline will be decoratively carved. This outer circle serves a purpose beyond mere decoration. During the tree carving phase, this part of the blank usually suffers from nicks and scratches. Carving a decorative border into this area hides the damage. The outline of the corner leaves are also cut with the carving knife.

Stop cuts are made at the end of the branches with a large gouge. Notice that the rounded shape of the gouge is similar to the curve of the circle. By pressing the gouge straight down, the stop cut depth is easily controlled and will have the same curve as the circle border.

Now the piece is fully prepped and ready for carving. At this point, there are about 10-12 hours of work already in the project. Nearly half of that was just the scroll saw phase, which included drilling the holes and removing the waste wood.

The next installment will show how the backside is prepared.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Follow My Carving - Gnarly Tree - Step 3

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.

The root system has been cut out as have the two bigger pieces on either side of the truck.

The lines coming up the trunk from the roots will be cut into the blank before the pattern is removed. These will be carved using a special under-cutting technique that will create a dimensional aspect to the root system. This will help give the illusion of them going around the base of the tree.

To make some of the roots appear to be in the background, their height will have to be lowered in a stair-step fashion. Since the blank is only 3/8” thick, great care must be taken in removing enough wood to achieve the effect without making that part of the piece too fragile.

The next installment will show the stop cuts.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Follow My Carving - Gnarly Tree - Step 2

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.


The waste wood has been removed from this quarter of the carving. It’s preferable to remove the smaller sections first. Leaving the largest sections until last helps retain the stability of the blank while it is being worked. It took over an hour to remove just this much wood.

Since wood comes from round trees, solid blanks tend to bow as sections are removed. Choosing the right wood and grain as well as proper architectural design of the pattern is critically important for this type of project. If these two factors are not addressed, the blank could bow to the point of exploding into pieces.

Most scroll saw artist don’t have to take these factors into consideration because their blanks are usually made of thin plywood, which will retain it’s flat shape regardless of how much wood is removed.

For carving purposes, solid wood blanks must be used, but they are specially made from two smaller pieces of wood that have been joined at the center. All of the carving blanks used by Heartwood Art are created and hand-selected by old-world craftsman Del Craft, owner of Del’s Woodcraft based in Colorado.

In this picture of the pattern you can see the outline of the outer circle as well as the oak leaves that will be carved in shallow relief into the triangular corners between the circle of the tree and the outer frame.

The next installment will show the exposed root pattern for this gnarly oak.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Follow My Carving - Gnarly Tree

To celebrate Heartwood Art carvings being featured in upcoming issue of Woodcarving Illustrated the "Follow My Carving" series was created to give you a an insider’s view on how the art is made.


The pattern for this gnarly tree has been adhered to the wood blank using a 3M spray glue that is mildly adhesive, allowing the paper to be lifted from the wood once it’s been cut out with the scroll saw.

The saw uses a very thin blade with teeth only on one side. It reciprocates up and down like a sewing machine needle. Small holes are drilled into the corner edges of the waste wood sections to allow access for the saw blade.

You’ll notice that the holes are very close to the lines in tight corners. While it’s fairly easy to maneuver the blade around curves, the holes make it easier to change direction and cut tight angles. For accuracy, the holes are made with a drill press. It’s important to be as close to both lines of the angled area as possible without actually touching the lines.

The entire pattern has required over 80 drill holes, almost half of which are seen here. It takes a lot of patience and focus to drill each one as accurately as possible. Since the blank is 11.5 inches square, holes closer to the center had to be hand drilled. The blank was simply too big to allow access to these areas on the drill press.

Next, the waste wood areas will be cut out.

To see more carvings, please visit the Heartwood Art site.

Frames With Character

Another Heartwood Art carving will soon be featured in Woodcarving Illustrated. To celebrate, a new Follow My Carving series is on the way. This time I'll be using standard picture framing instead of making my own.

There are a lot of great old frames with "character" just waiting to be picked up on the cheap at a yard sale then recycled into a work of art. The ones in this picture were collected by my good friend, Connie Weaver, who owns S & S Framing here in Nashville. She has been very generous with her time in helping me figure out ways to use standard framing for an upcoming instructional feature for magazines that will publish next year. She gave me this collection of frames that will be used for a few smaller carvings she'll dispaly in her gallery. I'll be creating those before the end of the year.

But, the next carving on the drawing board is another big tree. It's wonderfully gnarly with lots of turns and crooks in the limbs plus bunches of knotholes. The wood for it should arrive soon. Del Craft hand-picks all the blanks for my tree carvings. He's in Colorado and is sending me some nice birch and soft maple.

Check back here on the blog often, or sign up for the RSS feed to be notified when I start the next series and watch the tree being made from start to finish. This is one of the few carvings that will be available for purchase in the 2009 series.