Capital Woodcarvers Association

CARVING TYPES

There are many different kinds of wood carving applications. For the purpose of this resource we will limit these to the following main types:

Carving in the Round and Caricature Carving: Both these types of carving require carving in 3 dimensions. Carving in the round or realistic carving is carving in 3 dimensions and is limited to some type of scale of a real model. This can include animals, humans, birds, wildlife, etcetera. Caricature carving is 3 dimensional carving but in a more free hand comical sort of way.

Chip Carving: Chip Carving is a precise, detailed type of carving using knives to remove small chips of wood from a flat surface. Often geometric in design these chips are made from triangular cuts and once removed produce an intriguing design on the surface of wood.

Relief Carving: Relief Carving cons·ists of carving a figure or picture on a flat wood surface. Relief carving is broken into 3 types; Lbw Relief, Medium Relief and High Relief. The difference in types is how many layers of depth make up the relief carving. “Low Relief” is when the picture barely stands out from the background (usually 2 or 3 layers) while “High Relief” (usually 4 or more layers) stands out considerably.

Bark Carving: Bark Carving is a mix of Relief Carving and Chip Carving on a piece of Bark. This type of carving is very free form and usually consists of many small cuts and chips to make up the complete carving picture. The two main types of bark carving are whimsical houses and wood spirits.

Power Carving: Power Carving is using power tools like Dremel, or Foredem, and a variety of cutting and smoothing bits to establish the same results gained by hand carving but in a quicker amount of time.