Carving a simple Wood Spirit

DIY Article
As I was asked to do a tutorial I thought I would give it a go, now I have not carved many of these before so I’m no expert but this is how I carve them.
I used a small piece of Ash about 3cm wide, so the detail is never going to be as good as a large carving.

The tools I have been using are cheap detail carving tools like these you can get them from Ebay I think I got these a few years ago for a pound.

I start off by carving out the size and shape of the face with the 6mm gouge.

When I am happy with the face size I remove the bark leaving the nose in bark.

I leave the bark on the nose as a guide, you can use pencil to mark out your face details if you want or you can just do the whole carving by eye. For the next bit I use a pen or pencil to mark out details of the eye sockets and the moustache.

Here you can see where the top of the eye sockets are and the shape of the moustache marked out in pencil.
Now I start to carve out the eye sockets using the 6mm gouge, to determine the depth of the eye sockets you have to imagine how big your spirits nose will be.


When your happy with the eye sockets.

You can then remove any wood around the face to give the moustache, beard, and nose the shape and depth you want.
To remove the bark from the beard I use the 7mm straight bevel.

Now at this stage when your happy with with your spirits face and beard you can start to add detail, I use the v shaped tool to carve out an outline around the beard

As this is only a small simple carving I am not too bothered with the eye detail so I use a 4mm gouge tho carve out the eyes

Now you can start of by adding the hair, eye brows and other details to your wood spirit.

Now that its taking shape you can refine any other details or re shape any part of the face if your not happy with it.

At this stage I am quite happy with it and have an idea as to what this little spirit will become, so I start to carve the top and bottom of the spirit with the knife.

The idea I had for this little fellow now I’m happy with him was to soak him in scented oil add some elastic.

And turn him into a air freshner for the van at work, now he can watch over me all day.