How To Carve an Eye! (Knife-Carving Lesson)

Hello makers and crafters, puppet masters, greater creators, and theatrical fabricators. My name's Jack, spelled like yak, here with another video. Tutorial time! Today we're going to learn how to carve eyes. The first thing we'll talk about is wood grain and grain direction. The easiest way that I've found to talk about wood grain is first to talk about what wood grain actually is. You can't see it super well here. Let's just draw a few lines that trace the grain. So that's the grain direction, but what is grain? The easiest way to think about it is that wood is made up of really tiny straws that we call fibers, and those fibers are made out of cellulose, and they're stuck together with another substance that is called lignin, and lignin is sort of the darker part of the wood, and then cellulose itself is basically, you know, clear or appears white. And so what we're looking at is you can imagine a bunch of straws that are all sort of loosely stuck together. They're attached to each other, but they're definitely stronger in this direction than the other direction. The other way to think about the grain is to think about it as the horizon. So if this is a horizon, then if I make a cut going this way, then I'm going downhill, just as if there was a little hill here. And if I make a cut going this way, then I'm going against that grain. I'm cutting all those straws in the difficult direction, and so I think about that as cutting uphill. So for the remainder of this tutorial, we'll talk about cutting things as downhill and cutting things uphill, and you can see immediately that what happens when you cut uphill is that instead of it cutting smoothly, all those straws that are barely attached to each other except for the the sticky lignin in between, they just separate, and that's what we call splinters. Let's take a closer look. I'm going to shave off a really fine layer so we can look at what this is actually made of. These are the actual fibers that make up wood, and you can see that they're actually really easy to pull apart in this direction. They shred pretty easily, but actually pulling them in this direction and breaking them takes a considerable amount of force. In fact, I can't really do it. They're actually really strong in that direction, and that is the fundamental truth about wood grain that you have to get familiar with in order to successfully carve. So time to draw an actual eye on here. If I'm carving on a head, then generally I have the wood grain already moving in this direction, so I'm going to be carving perpendicular to the grain. Now the first thing I do, I'll just do a simple eye right here, and I haven't done the work to carve out the nose or recess this in, you know, create a eyebrow, but this just gives us kind of a starting place. Now the thing to do when you're carving out a line in the wood, particularly perpendicularly, is that I'm going to approach it from about a 45 degree angle on both sides of the line, and I'm imagining that this line is actually buried somewhere deep in the wood, and I'm trying to target that line with the tip of the knife. And so I have to carve in a way that imagines that line somewhere inside the wood. You can see I've carved next to the line, imagining it down lower. Now I come at the other side of that same line, and it's removed all those chips. But I want to point out something while we're looking at it. Notice how fragile all these little pieces are of the broken grain. I've cut through the grain, and now you can see how the fibers really want to separate. It's really easy to pry them apart. That's the lignin giving way, letting the cellulose fibers break apart. Understanding how that works is really critical to getting good detail when you're doing the fine carving around the eye. The reason why it's critical is because now you understand that I can't approach this next cut in this direction. What happens when I make a cut in the wood? You can see the fibers being disturbed. All these fibers that I just cut are now fragile. It's almost like if you've been to the beach and you've walked on a sand dune where there's sort of a crust on the top of the sand. And as soon as you step on it, the sand becomes loose around it. It all wants to fall apart. So I have to treat this the same way with the eye. If I then come and make another cut right next to the first one going in the same direction, I'm going to disturb all of this and what's going to happen is it's all going to be weak. That just breaks right off. So if I want to make a really nice cut that is right next to something I've already done, I have to cut in a way that protects the weakened grain. So here I'll make this cut and I've got a nice little trough that I've carved in there. Now if I want to make another cut so that I have a peak here, I have to carve away from what I've already carved toward the stable wood. So I'm going to carve into that and cut myself a line right along that peak. And now if I rotate this around and cut in the other direction, you'll notice that only the fragile wood pops up. This little peak that I've made in here, this is still strong. I still have sturdy, stable wood fibers there. So knowing that is how I've to approach the eye. Here if we get in close, we can see all the little detritus in the bottom of the cut. You can see how all these fibers have broken. You can see the detritus in the bottom of this cut. My next task is to cut the next part of the eye and with what we just learned, I need to cut away from the fragile part of the wood. So now I've disturbed grain going in this direction so I can make my next cut with pretty good confidence that the actual eye that I'm trying to protect is still in good shape. I'll clean out the detritus from the bottom of that cut. Two cuts in a piece of wood don't make an eye. I need to now round this and I'm going to do what's called a pyramid cut. What that basically means is that it's three or four sided. I'm going to cut into the wood from three or four directions, in this case three directions, and remove a chip where I have separated all of the fibers on all sides. You can see that that starts to get deeper into the corner of the eye. And next I'll do a process of rounding that is effectively smaller cuts that do that same thing. I'm moving away from the center of the eye, protecting the area that I want the fibers to remain sturdy. Cleaning out the detritus from the bottom of the cut as I go. You can see there, I separated the fibers right down the middle. I just lifted all those straws that are stuck together with lignin. When I'm cutting directly with the grain, that's what ends up happening, is I just remove those fibers. This isn't cut very deep. This is still what we might call bow relief. Bow relief is when you're not actually making a fully three-dimensional carving. You're just kind of carving a slightly recessed surface carving. But you get the basic idea. Now I might add a lower eyelid, again moving away from what I've already carved, so I'm protecting the strength of the wood. I'm just going to make a cut going away. I want to be careful here. I don't want my knife to slip. I'm thinking about where my thumb is, and so I'm going to move my thumb a little bit so that just in case I mess this up and I slip, I'm not going to run across my other thumb. Here I have to be real gentle. I don't want to cut so deep that I'm going to run into my previous cut and disturb this very delicate line that I've made. I want to do a bit more rounding because we still have a lot of facets. I'm just going to real gently remove a little bit of those peaks. I might have to recut along this line just to get a little bit deeper around the eye. Now I'm carving just a little bit of a deeper channel, making that eye a little rounder, and I'll need to do a little bit more in the corners so that it's more spherical. Cutting pretty deep here and cutting pretty deep here, and then just parting those fibers. Now it's yet a little bit rounder. Let's draw this on here right there. First I want to cut that line gently. This is a very sharp knife so it doesn't take much pressure, and then I'll be very gentle in cutting right up to that line that I just created. Basically shaving right up to the line a little deeper, and you can see I've got some previous cuts that left things a little bit sloppy, so I might want to clean those up too just by shaving off a tiny bit. Again, very gentle, not using very much force at all, always carving away from the most fragile part. Let's cut this lid a little bit. You can see what happens when I break one of those fibers. Now this is all weakened. I went a little too intense, so let's rebuild this. This is the great thing about wood carving. You don't actually lose much if you have to go in and do a little bit of touch up. It's kind of a progressive uncovering of what the sculpt actually is. Layer by layer I'm carving down a little bit deeper, tidying things up. If I want to, I can continue to reinforce the corners of the eyes. Let's reinforce the other corner of the eye, again doing that sort of pyramidal cut. There you literally heard the fibers break. If I want to, I can even use the same process to carve the shape of the eye. Here I'll draw a little pupil just so that I can get that centered. And my grain is running this way, remember. So the first thing I want to do is approach by cutting the fibers on both ends to make sure that I cut the fibers in the correct direction to remove this little chip. And I messed it up. You can see I've got a little split there. So let's just redo it. Just clear the slate a little bit so that it doesn't look like a snake eye. And I'll do a little more firm cut on the top and bottom. Still a little messy. Let's see what we can clean up. That's a very basic eye. You can get a lot more detailed if you like, adding something like an eyebrow. Let's do an eyebrow above here. I'm going to cut away from the delicate wood. Slice away a thin layer, going right up to the line I just created, gently preserving the fibers if I can. Okay, I've got one side of eyebrow. I'm going to carve away from the thing I'm trying to protect to preserve. And I'll excavate all around it to create that raised eyebrow. Gently carving away all the fibers. There we go. Beginnings of an eyebrow. Now I'm a little annoyed at how that pupil looks, so I'm just going to use my Dremel to finish carving a little bit, just a little bit of power carving to gently create a much better looking iris that's not perfectly centered. Let's clean up the iris. We're talking about such small amounts of wood being removed, and that's why I say it's pretty easy to correct any mistakes you make, because you can just dig down another very fine layer to a little bit more wood, and it'll clean up whatever mistake you made in the previous layer. You can just keep carving deeper and deeper. Let's cut this fiber here, protecting this delicate edge. Very small detailed work here, but with enough patience and care, let's carve a little bit of detail into the eyebrow. Here I'm just pressing into the eyebrow on both sides to carve a little diagonal cut. Do a bunch of those right next to each other. Always staying far enough away from other cuts that I've just made, so I'm protecting the durability of the fibers through these little cuts. They're very hard to see in this wood. It's a very blonde wood. There we go. So I hope you've enjoyed this and it was helpful. This of course is just one part of the anatomy of the face, or the physiognomy. I hope this helps you with other things, since the eye is one of the most delicate and challenging things to carve. Hopefully this is something that you find useful when carving the nose, and the nostril, and the mustache, and the butt-chin, and all the other little detailed parts of the face. All right, I hope that video was useful to you. If you liked it, please click like. If you want to see more, please subscribe. Ring the little bell icon so you can be notified of future videos. 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