The WOOD BEE CARVER is primarily a knife carver who started out as a young boy whittling with a pocket knife.  Thus, the pocket knife has been the first favorite carving knife even though custom made knives and commercial knives make up the arsenal of Whittle-Carving tools.

The key, learned over the years of experience is that a knife properly sharpened, no matter the make or brand will serve as a reliable carving tool.  Whittle-Carving is a term the WOOD BEE CARVER  uses to describe carving a hand held project and using only a knife to carve the wood to its final detail.

In order to carve miniatures that fit into a two inch cube it is essential to carve primarily with the tip end of the blade utilizing a slicing cut with every cut.  Pushing the blade into the wood with a wedge cut will compress the fibers, breaking them ahead of the cutting edge.  Slicing, however, separates the fibers ahead of the wedge shape of the blade producing a clean and polished cut.  With slicing cuts and using only a fraction of the tip end of the blade, very fine details can be carved into miniatures.

Some may think that miniatures are more difficult to carve than larger carvings, but in reality, miniatures are easier because there is less wood to remove with each chip allowing the carving to get to the finished form and then the finished details sooner.  Even though miniatures are easier, yet one needs to first be comfortable with carving larger projects in order to use the same proportions only in smaller detail when applied to miniatures.

In the “MINIATURE CARVINGS – Photo Trail” there is a gallery of miniatures carved by the WOOD BEE CARVER with the first one, a fisherman with a large fish, carved around1994 through the last one, a gnome, carved in 2007.

The photo trail will also show several pocket knives with very small blades that have been used in carving the miniatures in the gallery.  The blades are extremely sharp lending to creating clean and precise slicing cuts.  One final comment is that each carving is carved out of one piece of wood with no add on or glued up additions.  All photos in this photo trail were taken in the macro setting of Fuji FinePix S7000 digital camera.