Carve a Pig with Simple Tools | Clint Rose | Skillshare
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Carve a Pig with Simple Tools

teacher avatar Clint Rose, Wood Carving

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:20

    • 2.

      Project Overview

      1:03

    • 3.

      Using the template and marking the wood

      1:45

    • 4.

      Marking the inital saw and chisel cuts

      1:18

    • 5.

      The first saw cuts

      1:28

    • 6.

      Chiselling the silhouette

      3:18

    • 7.

      Carving the top view

      1:15

    • 8.

      Carving betwen the legs

      2:42

    • 9.

      Making and shaping the ear

      1:43

    • 10.

      Shaping the snout and mouth

      2:57

    • 11.

      Rounding over and fixing mistakes

      4:04

    • 12.

      Removing the pig from the wood

      3:47

    • 13.

      Sanding and cleaning up

      1:10

    • 14.

      Final thoughts and finish

      1:10

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About This Class

Carving "in the round" is seen as a rather tricky endeavour, but in this class I'm gonna show you that you needn't fear producing your first 3D carving and you can in fact learn to make one with no previous experience in carving or woodwork

I very much enjoy bringing people into the world of carving without using crazy expensive tools or complicating it with a list of ten different chisels to buy

So for this class all you'll need is a few flat chisels, a small saw, a mallet, a small piece of wood and a couple of clamps. With these tools you can create all manner of carvings in your own home in a very small space with very little expenditure 

Intro music : Music by Lesfm from Pixabay

Meet Your Teacher

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Clint Rose

Wood Carving

Teacher

Who am I?

My name is Clint Rose and I'm a wood carver from Suffolk, UK.

 

What do I create?

I make all kinds of carvings from signs to figurines and scenes. I use a whole variety of woods to create my work with a selection of chisels and knives. My pieces have found their way all over the world and I continue to be inspired by all the amazing creators and possibilities out there. 

 

Why am I on Skillshare?

Starting your woodworking and carving journey with very few tools and the whole wealth of the information on the internet can be a blessing and a curse. It's so hard to know where to start and to just make simple things. I'm here to try and simplify wood carving, which can be a very daunting creative pursuit, so that peop... See full profile

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Level: Beginner

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Transcripts

1. Introduction: My name is Clinton rose him in the UK and I've been woodworking since 20112016. I turned my passion into my job. And more recently I've been doing lots and lots of carving. I have projects in the homes all over the world. I really like encouraging people to get started in woodcarving with really limited tools and unlimited budget because that's how I started. You don't need to have all the fancy tools to begin with. The world of chisels is very, very varied and difficult to look at when you don't know much about it. So I'm here to show people that you can still make something to be proud of with some very simple tools. In this class, you'll learn how to make little piggy with no prior experience. So woodcarving we need is a couple of flat chisels. Malate saw a piece of wood and table to clamp it down to two, hold it steady on, I suppose some clamps to clamp it down. It's perfect for complete beginners to woodcarving. We learn how to use the chisel to cut the wood cleanly and better ways to hold the chisel to make better use of it also had to use the soil and the malate to make coding easier and a little bit faster. Because then move on to some more detailed animals and maybe start to figure out the kind of chisels you want to use in order to do that. By end of this class, you should be able to carve your very own little piggy. You should be more confident and carving and ready to take on some more challenges. I hope you enjoy it. 2. Project Overview: For our class project, we are gonna be turning this piece of wood or a piece of wood similar to this, into this little pig. Going to do it just with hand tools, just with a saw to chisels and a mallet, which I'll show you now. What we need to make this little pig is soul like this. Malate, like this. A couple of straight flat chisels, just to call that pesky, whatever. This class is perfect for complete beginners to woodworking, not just woodcarving. And I've made lots of easy little steps for you to follow through so you can soar and carve away all the bits of wood that aren't needed to make your own little chunky pig to sit on your desk or your windows. So wherever you may want it to sit. I hope you enjoy it. 3. Using the template and marking the wood: Okay, so we're starting off with a piece of wood that is square on its end minus 3.5 centimeters squared. You could use any square piece and just tough to level up the template. This template will be slightly different than the one that you see in the resources. I'm going to show where the saw cuts and the chisel cuts are at the start rather than just the sockets because I think that makes it more clear. I'm starting off by cutting out the side view, the front view, and top view. And the reason that I have these three views, this is generally how I tend to do a lot of carvings, work with silhouettes from different angles or fill out that helps you get a really good basic shape before you then try and start and make details. Just going to use the site template first to trace around the whole pig. I'm doing it so that the feet touch the bottom of the piece of wood. Then we'll do is use a square and take the measurements from the pig and just trace them all the way around. So if I just go from where the pigs but is or it's behind, trace that all the way around on a square piece of wood. Then what will happen is I'll have a really good reference for where the pigs behind is on the other side. Then all I have to do is put the pig's feet on the bottom like I did the other side. Push the pigs behind right up against the line. And there we have a perfect silhouette that matches with the other sides. So that way we can keep referencing each side as we can. 4. Marking the inital saw and chisel cuts: So we've got our little piggy template on the word, and we've made sure to put the line right against his butt so we can go all the way around and put it on his button on the other side. Now we've got a drawer in the way the sockets ago. I had this little diagram with all these little red marks to show you where to do all the initial sockets. Now I'm just going to use that socket piece as a reference on drawn all the lines or the first cuts I have to make. This is just going to make it easier for me to see when I start using the soar. Because otherwise if I just do it in pencil or something, it might be kind of hard to see. I might go somewhere a bit wrong or something like that. I would like to stress at this point that doing something wrong, encoding is not always wrong. You can recover from mistakes. Sometimes you can make things a feature that you didn't think were going to work out properly. Sometimes you just have to go. There are times where you have to restart all over again. But most of the time you can make something out of something, even if those mistakes I just traced over again with the square and then put the same angles on the other side so I can reference those. 5. The first saw cuts: Now I'm going to clamp it down to my work surface and start to soar and chisel away. I'm using to pump clamps that you could use a number of clamps but just wanted to use those two because they were the ones I had on hand. I'm using a tendon soil here just to cut straight down the lines. And because I drew the lines all the way over with that square, I can keep looking over the top and referencing the other side just to make sure I don't cut down too far. You want to get really, really close to your line without going through it. Because that will make your life a lot easier if you get it as close to it as you can. Because after we've done this sore and work, I'm going to start doing chisel, which is a bit of a different thing to do and soaring. So I'm sorting this that was section out here. You could also just use a chisel rather than a sore there if you wanted to. And same with this bit here you can see I started to sort but then realized the chisel was really more appropriate. So we're just using the straight chiseled to cut that sort of top part of the nose off. To think we can be more accurate with a chisel, the mechanical soil in that instance. Then I'll just flip the word over so the bottom is facing up and a few more cuts down here with the time. So as well. 6. Chiselling the silhouette: Now just kind of showing you how to hold the chisel when you're doing a kind of push cup. You can hold it in your left hand like that and push with your right hand. Kinda having the bank handle of the chisel, the back part of the hand, a little chisel source sitting in the palm of your hand makes it easier to push if he find that too difficult, you can always do it this way with a mallet and a chisel. And believe it or not, you can actually do very accurate cuts with a mallet and a chisel with little, little taps were being kind of aggressive here, taking away a lot of material. But you can use it for very accurate cuts if you want to. That will type attacks. This is where the cuts really help because they act as a stop. Whenever you want the woods to stop that you're choosing, it's a good idea to make the stop cut first so that when you start chiseling, the wood doesn't split further than you want it to. Now I'm turning the chip will choose all kind of upside down. So we can get a different curve there. This is the chisel doesn't dig down to deep. Whilst we're trying to chisel out the waste. Here I'm showing you how to use the chisel to cut a curve in the piece of wood, you have to stop at that central line at the top, they are rather start from there, starting from the top and going down to the bottom because we're making a curve here. I couldn't really come back any further because I might split out that belly a little bit. I'm trying to go right at the center of the belly because we've got an upside down right now and pushed down and towards those legs. You can see we are making a nice curve on this side. And because we've traced the lines over like we did at the start, we traced the pigs behind that. I have a nice curvy line on the opposite side that I can follow as well. Now this one earlier that I had listed as a saw cut as it actually made it a chisel KOH instead, because I feel like it's easier and makes more sense to do it this way. Plus you get some extra this with a chisel. We're using the mallet with a chisel here because it's quite hard to chisel this particular part because it's kind of the end grain of the wood. The end of the world where all the fibers are sticking out. It makes it harder the chisel than chiseling along the fibers and width them, we need a bit more force. So we're using the chisel, using the malloc for this one to help us just get it rods that line. Now we come into the head and once again, I've got the chisel upside down to make this curve just to make sure that it doesn't dig in too deep. Because then I would start taking some of the nose off. That helps us get this nice little curve and I'll just using push here. I'm making sure to lean my left hand that's holding the chisel against the wood and I'm pushing with my right. Here's my hand leaning against the wood. And now I'm pushing with my right hand to get that nice cup. And it's good to have the hand that's holding the chisel against a surface somewhere. Is it gives you more stability. It's an extra point of contact. It makes it so that chisel doesn't want to wander around or regular round, or even maybe even come out of your hands. So it always helps to have your hand that's holding the tool on something firm, on something solid and more for the null, that tends to be the carving. 7. Carving the top view: It's now using our top template. And we know where to hold it because it lines up with that line that we drew at the back earlier where the pigs behind it. And that's just like the shape of the snout really is all that is. Because the rest of the body we're just going to shape how we feel like the roundness of a pig should be. This particular part is just for the snout. And you know, it's really up to you. It's sort of a subjective decision on whether you want to shake the pig's snout this well, you could just take a little bit off. You could leave it square like this if you wanted to. There's no rules. It doesn't have to be any particular way. I'm just trying to show you a way that you can make it with these flat chisels and sores that makes it maybe a bit more aesthetically pleasing. Looks a bit better to the eye. But everyone has a different taste. And you should do it the way you want to. Just take a few bits of advice to in this video, maybe change up the design if you want to. It's completely up to you. When it's going to look up the chisel kind of in the upside down with the bevel down so that we can get those nice curves without digging into the woods too much. And I'm using the malate since certainly engrain again, it makes it quite difficult to get through and get these curved shapes. 8. Carving betwen the legs: So now we have the front template at showing the two legs. I'm not really going to use that. I'm just gonna sort aside where the two legs are. And you should really doesn't matter too much. It's more just to do with how you want the pig to look. We're just going to leave a gap in the middle and signify where the two legs are, the forelegs are other. Obviously we've got two legs at the back as well. That template is just a kind of guide just to show you what it should look like from the front with the two that are legs sticking up. Because this is a bit of a tricky one. We're going to take the chisel, a ton of Anna angle and make a little V cut in here. You can do this by pushing through, or you can do it with a mallet behind it if you want, totally up to you. I'm just going to keep making that shape and taking that cut back until we get to the very edge of that line, pretty much. I'm making a nice big wide V. And we have to be careful because this is pine service sort of taken our time with it. Now I'm going to go straight through it. And because of the way the grain is oriented to this piece, it should leave fairly straight lines going up the legs, which we can then correct with a little sideways chiseling. So we're just taking out the waste underneath between the legs. Now we're going to come in the side like this, you see? And just trim off those sides. You can just keep trimming and dying until it looks the way you want. Basically, we're going to do exactly the same for the back. This one's a little bit more tricky because we don't have any space at the back for those wood chips to break out and say I'm having the rip them off. You could if you want it to do a solo cup and the back there first. But to try and keep this as simple as possible, I was just trying to show it step-by-step so that we didn't add too many confusing things in it once. I'm using the back of the chisel again, because the belly is sort of in the way. So I have to kind of lean down to get the flatness here. But it's basically the same technique as the front. Keep cutting away the flat area. The only difference here from the front is that we have to keep trimming away this bat back a bit at the back there to stop it from staying there. I mean, you could just leave it there if you wanted to, but we want to clear up just to get out of the way because it's kind of annoying. Then we're going to take the sides of the legs down once again like we did to the front. Just by using the chisel on its side, just to clear out those little bits. And of course it helps to have a chisel sharp as you possibly can. If you don't know how to show up on a chisel, you can ask someone else to do it. Hopefully. You can learn online through some videos, perhaps. 9. Making and shaping the ear: Now we're going to start figuring out the ear. You could use the template and perhaps do some carbon paper and trace this on or screw your pencil on the back and trace it on. But I decided to just draw it freehand because I think that makes it more interesting and I suppose it improves your drawing skills as well. Going to take just the smallest chosen we got here, which I believe is a six millimeter or seven millimeters of. And we're just going to go fairly straight down slightly and angle away from where the pencil line is. Say that we have room for that ear to be where it is. You might notice as you're doing this, maybe little bits might fly off here and there you might have a little bit chip out, a little bit they see sort of wanting to ship out so that it's going to break off. But that's okay. We're going to come to the body with a bigger chisel and just trim down to that line. So once again, we might've stopped cut just like we did with those sockets earlier when we took loads in the material off. This is the same kind of thing except which is awesome. So we're using that technique to make the ear sort of raise off the pig so it looks higher. So you don't have to take down the level of the entire pig, but rather just the area around the feature. Once we've got it sort of isolated and sticking up, we can then start shaping it. So I'm just trimming some of the stuff we're here to make it look a bit more curvy, a bit more natural. Like it actually belongs there a bit more. Rather than making it look like it was just stuck on. This sort of helps him. Once again, this is completely up to your own view on how you think a pig should look or how you want your particular picked a look. There's no particular rule. Just do it the way you want. 10. Shaping the snout and mouth: Now we're going to start shaping the legs and we're going from the leg into the front of the head here. So once again, the bevel is down on the chisel. You could use a mallet here if you wanted to. Because we were going with the end grain again. So it's a little bit tricky, but you can see how the grain is looking really nice there at the front of the face, how the shapes are all cleaned up. And it looks really nice Going from that leg down into the face. Now we're going to turn the chisel the normal way up and start in the same kind of thing from the other side. Just to make that leg transition into the face a bit more. You could skip this step if you wanted. You could do it in a different way. You could maybe just try and sand the transition. So again, a bit smoother, It's completely up to you. Now we just working out where the nose is, the pig. So we're making a circle on the front. And that kind of area that we had leftover. And a little mouth. This is where the details really up to you once again, because I've just done a nose and a mouth. No nostrils, no eyes or anything like that? None of the toes on the feet. So we're trying to keep this as simple as possible, really just getting a shape of a pig so that you can enjoy the kind of silhouette of a pig, I suppose. Now I'm covering everything with the bevel down on chisel again. So kind of upside down. We're just covering it up to the line of that circle so that we have this circular nose sticking out at the front, just to make it look a bit more like a pig. Basically. The mouth is a little bit tricky. You could use a saw to go down there with the mouth, but I decided to use a chisel. And what I'm gonna do here is try and cut slowly straight down and picking out little bits, but not letting the chisel pass out the other side of the face. Because if you let it pass out the other side of the face while you're doing this, you're going to break some of the wood out. The plan here is to go fairly deep, maybe go about halfway across the front of the face, just working the chisel down and taking it out. So it looks like a mouth that we're not going for anything really anatomically correct, but rather just making a suggestion that there is a mouth. Then we flip it over like we have here, and we do the same from the other side and we meet up in the middle. It doesn't have to be exactly the middle. But you just have to make sure that that chisel doesn't fly right through the other end of the word. And breakout loads Award from the other side because that's what will happen if you force a chisel all the way through. We're just bringing the two together that you could use a bit of sandpaper to clean up later if you wanted to. You can see the shapes come on quite nicely. 11. Rounding over and fixing mistakes: Now we're going to round over the belly. Just clamp it on its side and keep it all rounded over. Keep rounding ever bit by bit, taking tiny bits off. You don't have to be greedy and take massive bits off. The reason we've got it's still attached to the back of the word is to make what we're doing right now easier because otherwise the clamp would be completely on the way of what we're doing and it would make our lives miserable having to unclip the clamp every ten seconds. I'm trying to shape and get the finished size to as much of the body as I can before I start cutting it off the back of the word. So we're doing the back as well now, making sure not to push too hard and make any cracks or breaks or anything. Those accidents do happen as we're gonna find out in a second. But generally try to be as careful and slow as you can. There's not a race. You can do it in your own time. If you're fed up of doing it after five minutes, then go and have a drink, go and do some work, and come back to it again. Always good to come back to something with fresh eyes, stamps, shaping the back and just trimming it out so I can get a nice start to the shape and make it so I have as little work to do as possible when we come to cut it off the back, we want it to be at the stage when we're probably going to send it at this point without worrying about the back at the moment. But we want to get this part done as much as possible. You don't have any awkward clamping situations. Not doing that. Belly upside down, flipped upside down. And the good thing is it's quite a solid chunk. We can flip it in all different angles and keep holding it upside down and sideways. I know when it stopped or wherever. This is what I'm going to make a slight mistake. I'll keep coming in here with a chisel because I'm trying to get this belly nice and rounded. The more round you get a fail, the more essence you get a pig because he thought that nice round TBI kind of pig. So there we've just broken that leg off. The front right leg, I believe has just been broken off. We don't have to panic at this point. We can glue it together, that we can fix the mistake and carry on. I go a little bit of glue on where the leg broke off and on the top of the leg. I'm just going to push it back in the place where it broke off. Then we're going to clamp it together. Leave it for a day or longer. But generally a day is good enough. You could probably just leave it for four or five hours, but I'd like to leave my glyphs for a day before I do anything. So that's what I'm gonna do. When the glue is dry, we can snap that off. We can clamp it back in the same position and then clean up around it again. And it will be fine. Now we're clamped it feet down so we can work on the top. So you see it's all kind of rough from those sockets. I'm just trying to make it a bit less rough clean up. These is clean up the back of the head, stuff like that. Just to make it look more in English. Because obviously I think the chunk here and the tibia you get, the more kind of feeling you get of a pig. All these lights, smooth, rounded lines. It makes you think of a pig. But as I say, if you want to keep it angular, then you do that because it's totally up to you. It's your carving, It's not mine. Totally up to you how you want to do it. Now we're just going to shape the back part of those legs. This isn't the one that broke off. I don't believe I believe that's one of the other side. We're just going to shape these a little bit so they're a bit more like I want them to be same with the start of those back legs. And then move on. 12. Removing the pig from the wood: So now we've got most of our little piggy here shaped. We still need to keep it attached to the word as long as possible while we carve away the rest of it. So we're going to do a couple more sore cuts and a bit more chiseling until we can just about get to the final point where we can take it off, then we should be able to do maybe a little bit more cleaning up at the end and then some Sandy and there'll be it. Now we're going to use the template to figure out where the behind kind of comes in at the back. I'm just going to draw it on. You could trace it on if you want it to be it was going to draw it on. And also where the back leg is in the behind is that we already drew it on the side template, but that shows you where we're going to do the cuts at least. So I'm starting by cutting straight down from the side angle. It's a good idea. You have the reference all the way around so you can keep the cut straight. Use your square to have that straight line going all the way around the piece of wood. Cut down about halfway into the wood. And then we're going to chisel away where that top line is. All the way down the back. Is that gives us us it gives us all kind of backline. The wood, the angles in towards the, the pigs behind after say behind or not. But it's more polite, I think. Just taken out whatever way it using the malate again because this is the end grain of the wood. So it's kind of hard to just push through. If there's every time we need to use the malate, then use it even if you have any tiny little taps to get through something. The aim of the game is to just COVID the way you want. You don't have to rush it. Now we've got that shape there. We can get this shape here. Of course, we repeated that step on the other side as well. That was just to show you how it was done. So I'm drawing those lines back in there again, that's where the leg goes up at the back. And when the back goes down, I'm going to soar down to where that part finishes there. At the top of the behind. Then that way we can get our chisel and take it out bit by bit. Once again, you can see I'm taking out bits at a time. I'm not trying to do the whole thing all at once. Because even though it feels like it might take longer and maybe it does, it's a lot safer. It's a lot more accurate. I think it teaches you how to choose a more accurately and better than you were before. So we're taking the back down to where I finished that socket. Just shaping it. Once again, I'm just using how I feel the pig should look while I'm shaping here or not. There were points where I'm following the resources that guide that I gave. But there's other times where I'm just kind of like, you know what? That should probably be shaped like that. I'll probably take a bit of the hair, etc. Now we're just going to cut, try and cut the rest of the pig off by just slicing down that back part. Basically, it's a little bit tricky because you've got to hold the pig in place. Well, the accounting, you could clamp where my left hand is holding their navy. But I feel like this is sufficient enough. Almost at the end, we can probably just cut a little bit extra OF bit more. There we go. Now we can start sanding and smoothing. 13. Sanding and cleaning up: I wanted to keep on that piece of wood for as long as possible so we could get all these little bits carved down at the back here as much as possible. I actually really liked the flat piece on the back. But what it could do with is probably some sanding. I have a piece of 240 grit sandpaper. You didn't have to do 240 grid. You could probably use a grid if you wanted to. It really just depends on what kind of look you're looking for. But this is just help us get rid of some of the fluffy wooden bits and some of the bits that look a bit splint R3 or a bit too. There's corners and stuff on there, but bits might break off. We're just going to take down the edges and stuff for the best sandpaper. And then now we can do whatever we want with it after that. 14. Final thoughts and finish: I use just oil for my little piggy, but you could use varnish or pencils or die, or paint or wherever else you wanted to use on it. You could use it as a little desk mascot. Maybe you could drill a hole in it and use it for pencil holder or something. Maybe even had a Christmas tree ornament. Most of all, I hope you really enjoyed the class. I hope you're happy with your little pig that you made. Remember that mistakes happen. You can always try again and try again. And each time you'll improve, every time. Perhaps you can use these skills to go into make some more animals. Maybe you could just make tons and tons of piggies and have like a pig Army in your house somewhere. If you wanted to. I know someone who definitely want that. Hopefully you just have a lot of fun with it. And if you want to check out my other classes and please feel free to do so there's lots of other different ways you can carve things. Thanks a lot for watching. And maybe I'll catch you another time.