Carving practice in MDF?

[Eshmiel]

Having acquired a variety of carving chisels and commissioned them, the next stage in my learning to relief-carve is to follow the Chris Pye YouTube carving course, which involves practicing all the basic cuts on a board of tulipwood (lime being hard to find, expensive and not already in me wood store). Following that, I'll need to practice relief carving on actual projects before attempting one in earnest.

The recommendation for practice and learning is generally to use one of the "easy" woods such as lime, jelutong eastern white pine and so forth. After I use up my last bit of tulipwood on that practice board, I have no such stuff in my woodstore. I generally scavenge timber but there doesn't seem to be a lot (or any) of those "easy" timbers to get for nowt. And they cost, from a timber supplier, rather a lot for even one plank that might be enough for three or four practice carvings.

When looking about the interwebbery spiders' nest of YouTube I came across a channel in which relief carving demonstrations suitable for "biginars" are shown. They're all fairly simple but good-practice carvings in MDF. This surprised me as I didn't think MDF would carve without breaking up uncontrollably; and that the various constituents of MDF would blunt chisel edges in no time. Yet here are these demos.

https://www.youtube.com/@Waseemwoodcarving

Can any carver shed light on this business of carving MDF? Is it a reasonable medium to use for practice? I can obtain free MDF left-overs very easily.

 

[Amplidyne]

It's only a thought, but I'd have thought anything with a resin binder would be hard on the tool edges, as it tends to be abrasive. I wouldn't be in a rush to try anything other than natural wood TBH. Others may know different.

 

[Jacob]

Having acquired a variety of carving chisels and commissioned them, the next stage in my learning to relief-carve is to follow the Chris Pye YouTube carving course, which involves practicing all the basic cuts on a board of tulipwood (lime being hard to find, expensive and not already in me wood store). Following that, I'll need to practice relief carving on actual projects before attempting one in earnest.

The recommendation for practice and learning is generally to use one of the "easy" woods such as lime, jelutong eastern white pine and so forth. After I use up my last bit of tulipwood on that practice board, I have no such stuff in my woodstore. I generally scavenge timber but there doesn't seem to be a lot (or any) of those "easy" timbers to get for nowt. And they cost, from a timber supplier, rather a lot for even one plank that might be enough for three or four practice carvings.

When looking about the interwebbery spiders' nest of YouTube I came across a channel in which relief carving demonstrations suitable for "biginars" are shown. They're all fairly simple but good-practice carvings in MDF. This surprised me as I didn't think MDF would carve without breaking up uncontrollably; and that the various constituents of MDF would blunt chisel edges in no time. Yet here are these demos.

https://www.youtube.com/@Waseemwoodcarving

Can any carver shed light on this business of carving MDF? Is it a reasonable medium to use for practice? I can obtain free MDF left-overs very easily.

One way to find out is just to go for it. Nothing to lose and you never know!

 

[mwinfrance]

Pour some plaster into a plywood tray..practice on that when it's hard..look at the plaster carving that the Arabs did / do.. Get some wood , poplar will do if you want it hardish, pine will do for practice and indeed for lots of things, look up Adam_W's stuff here , not the chairs etc , though they are superb , but the frames and similar stuff using scrap wood and planks from building work. Slices from trees are good too, even green oak carves relatively easily.