Step by Step Dremel wood carving

Hey g'day everybody it's Matt here from Matt Carves. Today's video is sort of aimed at sort of like a beginner intermediate kind of level but everyone can learn something from this video I think and it's kind of fun to watch and it's a fun project. These relief carvings are simpler to do than sort of like full 360 videos so I'm going to be showing you how to carve this leaf right from the beginning to the very end. And there's lots of different ways you can put this pattern onto this wood. Today we're going to use this. This is baking paper. Sometimes it has a shiny side and a dull side. You want to choose the dull side up so you can sort of like print off something off the computer. Now you need a pencil the darker the better probably and just go over the drawing. So essentially you're doing this. Now this is going to reverse the pattern so just be aware of that but it's not too critical with a leaf. Okay so I've got that drawn on the tracing paper. Now just a word if you're drawing a leaf it's nice to have nice curved lines like that. That was a little bit straight on that one so I just changed it up a little bit. The curves sort of make it look a little bit nicer. So essentially we're carving on this little block of wood today and I'll put that on there and you sort of like want to have it you can sort of see you might want to take a bit of time but that looks about right to me. You see the drawing is down and what we're doing is just going over the top of it and so we'll just go around the lines again. Now if you had a real complicated design what you can do is this because essentially what you're doing is you're pressing the carbon on the other side onto the wood. Okay so I have gone over this drawing and it's transferring onto the wood so let's have a look. Okay so there it is on the wood and you might have a few missing lines and all of that but what I would say is just go over it again so I'll quickly do that. I might do it with a black pen. Now what I do is I take the wood back first of all and what I mean by that is you might have seen me carve this a little while ago so I've taken the wood so the wood was originally there and then I take it back and then I carve in the carving. So this is a simpler one to do today as opposed to that eagle although that eagle wasn't too bad in the end. So a few words here if you don't want to take too much wood back make this a little bit smaller so you would cut more like along these or make the leaf a little bit bigger so there's not so much distance around here. So what I tend to do is I'll just go with my finger like that around the block and once you have drawn that line around what I tend to do is I'll go in and just roughly kind of go around the leaf and I'm using the Kutzel Extreme Taper Bur there so you can see me I'm just about going up the line but maybe not quite and go around the whole leaf like that. Now we don't try and get into those real narrow parts although this part here is exactly almost the same as the bur. That's for handy. And to achieve a flat surface on the wood, well relatively flat, I tend to sort of like move the block or the bur while my hand's on the actual sponge on the table so you're sort of like using it as a level kind of surface and it seems to work pretty well and it's quite fast as well. So people kind of ask how long will it take to sort of take down all that wood. Well it depends on how hard the wood is. This is sort of like medium hardness and I would say it took me about maybe half an hour to get to that point. And so this is where we are up to now you can sort of see it's quite tidy around there and I've gone right up to the edges well not actually right up to the edges just pretty close there and what we're going to do is we're going to straighten up everything so it's really tidy around here and then we're going to shape the leaf. And I am using that Dremel cutter bur now. Now you can buy cheaper ones than the Dremel ones but you know I can buy these in New Zealand from just down the road so that's what I tend to do. And I believe they're better quality, they have a straighter shaft and they last longer as well. So we have taken the edges down with this one. You can sort of see I've done sort of like the main parts here around here and here and here and here but you might be asking how are we going to get into these really tight bits here. Well it's a matter of just using sort of like burrs that you've got. I've got this cut saw fine taper burr which is very very good. And here I am I'm just sort of like pushing down while the burr is parallel. Now this is quite an easy one to get at but the one above it might be a little bit trickier so I might have to change the angle of the burr. So just sort of like go slowly. I tend to sort of like do sort of like softer passes when I carve and just take things down gradually and that's the way I carve. It sort of like allows a lot of control in the end. And you sort of just want things to be as best as you can sort of like make it. And here I am doing the above one. You sort of see I'm sort of like using the tip a lot more to get into that real sort of like difficult part there. And we'll tidy this up as we go along and we're using different burrs for carving the actual leaf. Okay so we've got up to this point here. You can sort of see I've gone into the narrow parts and it's looking pretty good. You know it still needs a lot of tidying up but you kind of want to get it to the stage where you can sort of carve the leaf and then you can sort of tidy it up kind of later on. You don't want to sort of make it really really tidy because you might get rid of that part. So just make it good enough to go around the leaf and then as we go we will tidy this little leaf up. And we're at this stage where we can start shaping the leaf. So we've got sort of like this part much to play with. So we want to put some like contours in. You can sort of see here's a leaf that I did a while ago. It's got a little dust on it. And you can sort of see this contours that I've got going on there. It might be a little bit too much to do on this one but we can put in a few soft kind of curves. And if you can sort of see sort of like that leaf there kind of looks like it's going to be going sort of like that shape. Whereas this leaf here looks like it will go so like up like that and then like that. So what we will do is we'll put in sort of like some general shapes with a maybe the cutsaw flame bit. So we will just sort of like lower that bit down. Not too far. You don't want to go too far down. Probably to about here. So we're just sort of like not doing massive kind of contours but just like small contours to give this a nice flow. Right so let's start that. And I will say like we might lose these lines as well but just sort of like having your head those lines. And we've also got that picture that we can sort of use as a reference as well. So here we go we are putting in the contours. So to get that shape I need to go down sort of like at that main stem and then go up and then down at the tip of that leaf. Sort of just kind of think on how it's going to look and continually like look at the side of the leaf and how that's looking. I know it looks pretty rough at the moment but it's all going to be tidied up in the end. Pretty much with carving anything it goes through a really rough kind of stage but you kind of want the general shapes there. And it doesn't matter if it's rough but then you start honing down the leaf and sort of start making it smoother and putting in the finer details as you go along. Got some nice contours happening there all over the leaf. Oh focus focus. Right yeah so you can see the contours just like leaves going up. If you're ever in doubt sort of just like look at you don't want all the leaves turning down maybe some turning up some turning down. Try and make it kind of not uniform uniform you don't want this one and this one going the same way. What do I have? But anyway this one's going down this one's going up these two are kind of going up. We'll draw that center line in again and what we want to do now is we kind of want to put sort of like if you look at this one. Now I'm not going to say that this is going to end up looking like this one but we can sort of see um I've kind of made it so like those little channels there are sort of like within a dip. So we're going to do that on this one. So we'll just sort of like make these a little bit sort of like that they're in a little dip. Don't go too deep at this stage because we need to put in the little I don't know what they're called veins. Yeah we'll call them veins. Okay so the next plan of attack is two. What are we doing? We're going to put in the lines or the veins we decided they were veins. So you can draw them in if you want or you can just go freehand with your carving. Let's just draw in a couple and I'll show you how I put them in. Now there's heaps of different ways to carve. Let's concentrate we'll do that main one and maybe one of these little ones and later on we'll put in like the tiny ones that come out like this. Now if you're a beginner carver what you want to do here is probably just do one line sort of like an indentation stem but I've decided to do sort of like ones that are raised up a little bit so you sort of need to do another indentation sort of like just a small way away from the other indentation and then sort of like take the outside parts away. You'll sort of see what I mean there. Now you can do this with a variety of burrs. I've got an inverted cone burr on here which is not too bad or you could use one of those t-shaped burrs. If you're really really good you could use a cutter burr here. The problem with cutter burrs is they do tend to sort of like take a lot of wood out so if you're not sort of prepared for that. Now I'm using the cutcil fine taper burr and sort of just taking down the leaf that's sort of like going up to that little vein and it's sort of like a lot of playing around with these veins because you want to sort of like narrow them down and taper them off so they go from semi medium size to sort of like really pointy at the end. So I'm using that t-shaped burr there to sort of like just tidy things up and sort of you can use the sort of face of it to sort of like narrow down the actual veins as well. Here I am I'm actually putting in a vein like here and you can sort of see I'm making it way too big so I'm going to have to sort of narrow that down as I go along. So I'm sort of doing that now and these are really really fine movements so just be aware of that. They are pretty hard to get these veins quite skinny but you know carving for me is about the process of carving. I love going slow and just really really thinking about what I'm doing. How can I sort of make this a little bit better and make it look like a vein. It's just yeah I really enjoy that about carving is everything is kind of every carving is different you know every burr is different. A lot of people say what burr should I use to do this? Well there's probably a selection of about six and it all depends on the carver as well. I kind of like recommend people sort of go sort of like what would you say you're sort of like just if you come across a problem just try one thing and then try another thing and another and another and you will find out which works the best. You can sort of watch me here and you'll say well he's just picked up that one burr and he's doing that. Well there's actually probably about three or four that I could pick up and I've just decided on this one and just making it work at the moment but I'm gonna probably I'll put on a maybe a cutter burr and show you how to do it with that as well. So here is the cutter burr. So the I guess the benefit of the cutter burr is a little bit faster because it's going to take more of the material away really really easily. The downside of it is it's quite hard to control. You need a really steady hand to do it and it can take chunks out of the wood as you go along but I did the rest of the veins with that cutter burr. It's a really really nice cutter burr this one and I can't really give you a link for it because I just bought it from a shop in New Zealand. It doesn't have a make on it or anything like that. Now here we go it's starting to look pretty good but sort of like to finish it off I haven't quite put those little tiny veins in but what I thought I'd do is sort of like smooth the surfaces off with that diamond burr there. That's my favorite shape diamond burr. It's like a flame burr. I've just recently actually done a review of these burrs. You can check out that in the top right hand corner. So really really nice burrs. Really nice shape and the consistency of them is very very good as well. So sort of like just go over the top of the leaf with those burrs and you can actually use a little bit of sandpaper as well. So I've got that tip just going into the inside edge of that vein. Pretty much there's not much else to say here you just got to go over the whole leaf with this thing and it doesn't take long. Okay so that looks pretty cool. Got the veins quite skinny. You don't want them fat as they kind of look a little bit weird. Yeah so that looks pretty cool. We'll put in some tiny little veins now and these aren't sort of like sticking out veins they're just like marks that you put in. You can draw them in first or you can just sort of like put them in and you can put them in. I find something with a nice sharp edge like one of these t-shaped burrs is pretty good. You go too big then they'll end up sort of like um quite straight. So you want to be able to maneuver them when they're smaller and just put in a few and see if they look good and if they don't well try a different way. That's kind of what I do. Next part we're going to do is we're going to make this leaf stick off. Now you don't have to do this if you're comfortable with just getting to this stage you could probably just smooth this off which I will do a little bit later on. We're not going to go really thin like this because this wood is very very hard and this wood is not so hard so it probably can't take going too thin. So we just kind of have to judge it as we go. And I am using those t-shaped burrs they're very very good for this and you can sort of see a little bit of smoke there so you can actually lower the speed of the dremel. That's what I tend to do if it's burning too much I'll just lower the speed and so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to sort of like pull up on the burr so the bottom edge of that burr and top edge I'm not quite sure what you'd call it but anyway you can sort of see me I'm pulling it up so that underneath of that wood is sort of like disappearing and leaving a nice undercut there. You sort of like just want to do it to you sort of like comfortable don't take too much out because you don't want your leafs kind of like cracking off. I think that looks pretty good actually. Yeah so you just need to go around with that and if you don't have one of those t-shaped burrs you can use other burrs as well. Now you can sort of use uh well this burr which is my favorite burr this is the Kutzel fine taper burr and you sort of just got to go under the leaf just like we did before but you're kind of like more pressing it in and with those t-shaped burrs they come in lots of different sizes so you can sort of like go down in a size to get into those really tight areas. Yeah great burrs for putting in undercuts and to get rid of all the bumps on the background I use this little disc sander that attaches to the Dremel. I think I've got it like about 80 grit on there and then went down to I don't know I think it was like 150 grit or something like that um always hard to focus on those ones but you can sort of see there it's pretty smooth goes kind of underneath the leaves as well but I kind of use the t-shaped burrs that we're using before to sort of like smooth off that as well good focusing on the Dremel handle there. I'll tell you uh filming is not easy especially this overhand filming and it's like auto focuses on things goes out of focus it's a pain. Now we are sort of like finishing off here and I've gone back to that diamond burr and sort of just like smoothing off the edges and sort of taking away a few little rough areas that you can sort of see. Don't spend too long doing this. I kind of like my carvings to look a little bit rough anyway and you kind of want your carvings to be a little bit rough because that sort of says well hey they're handmade and they're made uh with love and care uh not by a machine and that's what I kind of like about carving is you can sort of see that it's carving it's not sort of like a laser carved or anything like that it's got a few kind of like rough areas in it Okay so we are up to this part and um we're going to make the background red so this is uh some spirit based dye from Bree Wax. Now you can use red paint if you want um I would probably recommend um maybe thinning it down so you can sort of see this stuff sort of like really sort of like moves along so the fact that there's an undercut under there is quite nice because you can sort of just not worry too much about getting it on the leaves and all that like I kind of think artwork really um shines if you manage to get that contrast happening you can sort of see it's sort of taking shape there. Might do the sides as well. Now if you do get a little bit of stuff on your carving you can actually just um sand it off or um it's gone a little bit deeper you could probably use a burr to get the um stain off your carving but like the dye I mean um dye tends to absorb into the wood so it's a little bit harder to remove than say a stain which sits on top of the wood. I'm not sure how I'm going to get into there probably a smaller brush would be the way to go so that's looking pretty cool. Just do the sides I'll just try and yeah that's worked oh look see got some on there we'll fix that up. Sorry this is turning out to be a very long video but we're putting on a wax now which will bring out the sort of like highlights and sort of protect it and make it a little bit shiny and if you made it up to this point if you could hit that like that would be awesome um yeah if you like these longer videos uh let me know in the comments as well because um well they don't tend to do as well as the shorter videos because we've all got short attention spans today um probably about three seconds is mine as we scroll through life and do all that kind of stuff on our little phones anyway I'm sort of changing subject there so I'm just polishing it with that um uh little sorry excuse me that little fluffy thing that you put on the end of the sanding thing if you get what I mean actually works out quite well uh polishes up quite nice you can sort of see it there so like shiny I quite like that kind of like not really bright or red thing happening it's sort of like dulled down a bit and looks like it's aged