When carving beards and hair, you have to realize that in nature, hair isn’t straight. Hair naturally grows with at least some curve, especially facial hair. Therefore, when attempting to emulate this in your wood carvings, you need to make a series of varied, elongated “s” and “c” shapes.
A good starting point, is to use a v-tool to make some deep elongated “s” shapes throughout the beard area to give the beard that curved, uniform depth that is seen in real life. Now you can use another smaller v-tool to carve other elongated “s” shapes to fill in the voids created by the previous step. You can now go back with another v-tool or your wood carving knife and make even more definition.
The important thing to remember when carving hair, is to never make it uniform and equal. Natural facial hair is uneven and scattered. If your facial hair was always uniform and straight, it would look like you had Crystal Gayles’ hair hanging from your chin.
When studying a new carving technique, I always like to see some examples of what I am trying to accomplish. Here are some example pictures that I hope will give you an idea of what I am trying to explain above. Short of a step by step photo example, these close-ups show the elongated “s” shapes in the wood.
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- Wood Carved Beard 4
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- Wood Carved Beard 2
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- Wood Carved Beard
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- Wood Carved Beard 3
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- Wood Carved Beard 5