When wood carving students have their first lesson they often ask “Do I need to be artistic to carve”. The whole point of wood carving is the progression of skill in different areas, the artistic side of wood carving too, but just like you will get better at holding a knife you will get a more artistic vision when you see a block of wood in front of you.
You do not need to be artistic to carve wood. Although creativity and artistic abilities help beginner woodcarvers to progress faster, they are not at all requirements to learn, succeed, or be good at wood carving.
If you are not confident in your artistic abilities or you would like to improve them, there are many ways that you can train your artistic vision. In any case, some wood carvings don’t require any artistic abilities, all of this and much more we will cover in the article below.
How To Training Artistic Abilities And Creativity In Wood Carving
To have a better feel for the artistic side of wood carving there is only one recipe which is practice. Of course, you don’t want to dive straight into the difficult things but starting somewhere is the most important.
3D vision is a good way to train artistic abilities, it requires you to keep in mind both the ratios and the details of your carving. Therefore a way to start enhancing your artistic abilities is through relief carving.
You can both practice Youtube tutorials such as the one below or find templated on relief carving and follow those:
A very important part of wood carving is making your own decisions when carving. What this means is that if you are following a tutorial or a pattern of any kind and you feel like something doesn’t belong there or is missing, you need to make the change!
Specifically, if you are trying to be more creative you can set a task to make at least 2-3 changes and additions in every project that you do. It can be an ornament on the side or extra attention to detail and it can go as far as adding a third arm to your gnome, whatever you come up with in the moment.
It is very important you don’t necessarily assess whether your change has made an improvement to the carving. At first, there is a good chance that your change wasn’t the best part of the woodpiece, but the fact that you came up with it is what matters, and over time your improvisation will become better as you become confident with being creative in wood carving.
Another way to be artistic in wood carving is by using more tools as your carve. This is because the more variety you have on your wood carving the more ideas you will come up with. Therefore when choosing the next few projects try picking the ones that require a few extra gauges and chisels to be picked up from your inventory.
Lastly, don’t only follow tutorials and make things up by yourself. Don’t worry if they come out twice as bad as if you were following a tutorial, this is simply because it is harder to keep every ratio and detail in the mind rather than have it done on paper or have someone show you the step by step guide. Everything comes with time.
Carvings That Don’t Require Artistic Abilities
On a different topic, not all woodcarving styles need to be so artistic as you may have imagined. While whittling and relief requires you to really focus on a lot of details other styles such as chip carving comes a little more simple.
If you want to know more about chip carving check out our 7 chip carving tips for beginners.
It is not at all true that chip carving requires zero artistic abilities, but it is absolutely certain that you can be very good at chip carving without being extra creative.
Chip carving has a lot of already created for you patterns that you don’t have to create from scratch, which makes chip carving a perfect style of carving for someone who wants to concentrate on technique rather than on self expression in their carvings.
Another great trait of chip carving is that it is fairly easy to pick up. As mentioned before the creative part of chip carving is often already done for you in the form of patterns that you can either copy of change up a little to how you see better fit, regardless of that the backbone is there which lowers the barrier to entry by a lot. In other words, you can probably make something worthy by week 2 of chip carving.
Required Skills For Wood Carving
In this article, we emphasized how you don’t have to be artistic and creative to be good at wood carving. With that said it is not at all because wood carving is in any way simple there is still something, you need to have in order to succeed in wood carving.
The required skills for wood carving are none other than patience discipline and dedication as wood carving is not a hobby that you will be able to show off to others after the first week of carving. Wood carving does require some time and good old practice to get the necessary skills.
For a guide on how to get started with wood carving, you can check out our post about what exactly you need before your first attempt at carving wood.
Talent and a tenancy to be more creative certainly helps in the early stages of wood carving, but it can only get you so far. However, even with that, you will need to find a way to dedicate to the art.
Conclusion
To answer the question does wood carving require artistic abilities? Or Do I need to be able to draw to carve wood? The answer is no, you don’t. You can work on your creativity and 3D vision or carve in styles that require minimal artistic engagement but all that is only possible if you spend time getting better at wood carving as just like with everything else, it takes time to get good at it.
