Whittling is a fun craft to learn. I mean who wouldn’t want to whittle beautiful figurines or exotic spoons right? But how long does it take to learn to whittling from scratch with no prior skills?
All things considered, it would take a beginner anywhere from at least a week to a few months to learn all the basic techniques of whittling. It is however worth noting that patience, commitment, and a lot of practice are what really matter how long it takes.
weekend hobbyists that only practice on weekends may take longer than say someone practicing every other day. There are a few factors we will go through in this article. These are the factors that determine the time it will take a beginner to learn the art of whittling.
Learning Whittling Fast: A guide
Is whittling hard to learn?
As humans, we discovered the art of whittling many centuries ago. This is an art that we have learned, practiced, and come to love. So the question is how hard can whittling be for someone who is just starting?
Well, whittling is just a skill like any other Therefore learning whittling is not hard. There are many variations of whittling you can learn one of the easiest is perhaps spoon carving. So generally whittling is not a hard-to-learn craft.
What may be hard is to master that takes more time, dedication, and consistency but again just that and you’re on a path of discovery as you engage body-mind, and spirit in the whittling creativity.
Whittling vs woodcarving: Know the difference
A lot of people confuse whittling and woodcarving to the extent of using the two words interchangeably. However, there is a distinction between whittling vs woodcarving But what is this distinction?
The Difference between whittling and woodcarving is the tools used. In whittling, we only use knives as our main tools. the piece being whittled is held in the hand. On the other hand, in carving, we use an array of tools ranging from chisels, gouges, knives, and mallets, and in most cases, the piece is held by deploying a vice on a bench.
The two forms of art share a lot in common. For instance, the medium is wood in both crafts. The creative process is also similar to the steps like design transfer from paper to wood.
Whittling is also thought of as a branch of woodcarving. Woodcarving is the family with branches like whittling, chip carving, Carving in the round, relief carving, Scandinavian flat-plane, and chainsaw carving among others. To see more differences check out Whittling vs Carving The main differences
What should I whittle as a beginner?
When you are starting out you may be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things you can whittle. you definitely don’t want to start with a project that is too difficult and halfway through you give up and throw your whittling knife away!
You also want something challenging enough to place you in a learning position that sees you not only master fundamental whittling techniques but mastering your knife as well. So who do you find the sweet spot between the two aspects? what should you whittle as a beginner?
The best project to start with is a spoon. Well, you may think that sounds boring right? Spoons can be very interesting and fun to whittle as a beginner. remember the spoon can be as artistic as you like or as abstract. But it’s probably best to start with something simpler to introduce you to your whittling knife.
As you whittle away the spoon you get to learn the basic hand positions, different kinds of whittling cuts, and best of all you experience using your knife.
It may sound like I’m insisting on ‘using your whittling knife’ but as you will soon discover tools have a learning curve.
What this means is that the more you use a specific tool (of course with best practice in mind) the more you learn and understand how to use it best.
How long does it take to learn whittling: a summary
Whittling is a fun craft that really satisfies that creative itch that is in all of us. To learn this craft in the shortest time requires working smart. Start with simple projects that teach you the basics.
Simple projects like spoon carving will be easy to finish motivating you to move to more complex projects like figurines as you grow and learn more probably from whittling books.
If you’re ready to begin learning check out our article on Whittling for beginners.
Just starting to whittle so the article was very interesting.