Wood carving is a special craft. It requires extreme patience that could flourish with a fine imagination. If you decide to become a wood carver, you’ll have several styles to choose from. You could use just a piece of wood and a small knife. Or you could go so far as using power tools. So how can you know which style is best for you?

There are five main styles of woodcarving. Each style is distinctly different from the other. These styles are whittling, chip carving, relief carving, intaglio carving and carving in the round.

Whittling has been around for many hundreds of years. All the way back to the days of cavemen. One could say that it is because we began to whittle that technology began. It was the shaping of wood, after all—after the discovery of sharp edges—that sparked human imagination to make carts, cooking implements and clothes, weapons for hunting and methods of food gathering. Who would’ve thought?

So you want to whittle wood. Good for you. Whittling is the simple removal of pare shavings or cutting small bits from a piece of wood with a knife or a similar wedge-edged tool. No more, no less. So what does it take to become a good whittler?

Painting is a method of remodeling the world into your own perspective and telling people what that world means to you. Though you try to paint something similar to what you see, you end up adding something that you feel belongs in the picture and with that your own interpretation of life.

When you begin to paint, your canvas and colors ready to work, you begin to think of what would inspire you to keep working on it for hours. Though you may try landscapes or portraits, you have to be sure that it is the subject that you want to work on till the end. Here, you can begin envisioning how you want your painting to come about and the message you want to express in every stroke of the brush.