Best carving projects for a beginner

I want to practice carving but am unsure of the best projects for beginners

I won't presume to claim I know the "best" ones, but I can offer a couple things to check out.

What's best depends on what you want to carve and how you learn. Mary May is a traditional chisel and mallet carver, doing a lot of traditional (European-style) carvings. She is an outstanding instructor, I've been to one of her seminars, and offers online classes. The beginner lessons are free, with registration, and would be one way to get started and check out if her style of instruction works for you:

Mary May Carving

She's also has a book available from LAP and has been on (at least one) Woodwright's Shop show. (Available for streaming on PBS's website, I think.)

Another, simpler I think, form of carving that is trendy right now is Spoon Carving. It's a subset of green woodworking, evolved from different traditions but with a strong influence from Swedish Sloyd traditions. It requires a minimal set of tools and web-resources are too many to list these days. MoraKniv Sloyd straight knives are commonly available and cheap for a quality tool. Hook-knives and carving axes are less available and less "value priced", but are still available from many sources. For a taste, look for Wood Tools, run by Robin Woods (father) with design input from JoJo Woods (daughter), in Sheffield England. They have (multiple) Instagram accounts with examples of the tool making and spoon carvings. Their goal is to bring tool making back to Sheffield and to produce affordable tools.

Some of the other material includes several books from LAP, most on point would be Jogge Sundqvist's Slojd in Wood. I have a DVD from Jarrod Stone Dahl, which covers spoon carving from harvesting wood to the finished spoon. (PopWood used to sell it.) Peter Follansbee & Anne of All Trades both occasionally throw up quick instructional videos on Instagram. Also Anne has started offering online classes, including spoon carving.

I have a bunch of carving tutorials on my web site. Start with the simple flower and then you can go to some of the shells. The carving tutorials are towards the bottom of that page.

Mike

I was watching some Phil Lowe videos, The Art of WoodWorking, and he did 2 videos on beginner carving, and some exercises, he explains how to do, to develop reading the grain ans such.

For relief carving, try Chris Pye books. There are beginner patterns in them.

I think there are some carving tutorials on the Woodcarvers sub forum (this sub forum). You may have to search back quite a few years.

Mike