Robert Soderholm is a carving friend from Williamsburg, Virginia. We met several years ago when he was a student in a couple of classes I taught and have kept in touch at a distance. Most recently we visited again at the Dayton Artistry in Wood Show in 2015 and he shared with me his love for carving small carvings that have “FUN” written all over them. These two photos of the fun facial expressions carved in each face are offered here to encourage other carvers to have fun carving faces in a small format. These novelty carvings offer challenging fun projects to set the carver’s imagination and creativity free to discover a variety of facial expressions that one can carve. And they are fun gifts of friendship and encouragement to give to spread the joy of carving friendship.

The WOOD BEE CARVER often says, “Every carving project is a learning project, every carving is a practice carving project and the only way one learns to carve is to carve.” The only way one learns to carve faces is to carve faces over and over again. Soderholm is showing us a fun way and may we all follow his way by carving fun, small faces with a variety of facial expressions.  Thank you Robert for your inspiration and your friendship to the carving family.

The Bear Creek Hobo in the photograph above was carved using a Scimitar knife made by Mickey Gaines of the Bear Creek Blades. The knife was made in the continuation of the tradition of knives made by the late Ralph E. Long. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the old childhood puzzle with random dots jumbled on the page with a number adjacent to each dot? The puzzle was to draw a line from the dot beginning with number 1 to connect with the dot with a number 2 and then number 3, number 4 and so forth until all the dots were connected to reveal a hidden picture. Read the rest of this entry »