Betty's Carving Blog

Have you ever wanted to do relief carving but your drawing skills are something to be desired? there is a good trick for getting your wood to show your pattern without having to draw directly on the wood.
I simply draw a small picture of what I would like to do on a piece of paper, scan it to my computer and print on my laser printer. If you have good picture editing software, you can make a poster and change the size of your scanned piece of paper to fill whatever size piece of wood you have to carve.
You simply look at your print preview, adjust the size of the printing and send it to your laser printer. A medium or higher quality printing works well for transferring the photos to your wood. I cut out the drawing, tape it together place it on the wood and take a hot iron and iron the drawing directly onto the wood.

There are several things you should be careful about one is to be careful where you place the tape so that you do not run a hot iron and melt the tape and you want to have the print in position so that you do not move The drawing as you iron it onto the wood. If the word is bowed and has not been sanded You could have a problem with the transfer. But you can see from the picture below that my word is not a flat surface

you can see from this picture that the drawing has transferred and I have not had the problem of carving over many lines were I tried to correct the drawing as I drew.