Bio

CALVO WOOD CARVING SCHOOL is dedicated to the art and skill of wood carving for the beginner and intermediate students. 

Our philosophy is simple, to give you a very strong baseline in the essential fundamentals of carving. Then you can apply those skills to any style of wood carving design project. Our teaching is unique because we are a strong carving technique school. This is our focus for you as the student. We do projects as an exercise to help you learn a variety of different and important hand technique skills. We teach that you must incorporate body mechanics because wood carving is like a sport. For example, a baseball player at bat learns how to use his body to help his swing as he hits the ball. And over his career, he will continue to work on improving his technique. The same is true for a woodcarver with a carving tool in hand, there is a "tried and true" technique involved. We will also spend some time focusing on the carving tool design, yes- that means we will redesign your tools, because they don't come right out of the box and you will understand why. We will address sharpening your carving tools because sharpening is an art. I have had more students come to me and say "I have had these tools for a while and I still don't know how to sharpen them. Other aspects that we will study are the step by step approaches to a carving project, which includes both mechanics and visual mapping to get you to a finished project. We address the best woods to carve because the wood is your dancing partner in woodcarving and there are woods that lend themselves to carving better than others. We will study how to design a project and what elements are consistently important to create an attractive finished project. Finally, in my classes, I emphasize that I am training both your hands to carve and your eyes to see so that you can map your way through a carving design.