Do-it-yourself house wood carving. House wood carving House wood carving

The symbolism used in traditional house carving motifs has not only an aesthetic, but also a deep ethical meaning. In fact, a certain set of symbols placed around the “unprotected” areas of the house is a talisman. It is believed that the wrong combination of characters can be not only useless, but also harmful.

Ornament is usually classified into zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric and floral. The carving ornamentation is conservative and very traditional. It is thanks to the persistence of cultural traditions that we get the opportunity to see ancient symbols and elements that decorated the homes of our ancestors.

The idea of ​​protecting a person, his home, household items, and pets with the help of various magical images arose in ancient times and lasted for a very long time. According to the ideas of the ancient Slavs, the animistic ubiquity of evil scattered in nature was so great that man could not resist it. Therefore, a person had to protect himself with the help of protective symbols. First of all, they protected their home and clothes.

The house was decorated with benevolent pagan symbols placed on the most vulnerable areas of the home and yard. Let us note that both in architecture and in clothing, the same principle of placing incantatory ornaments was consistently applied - all openings, all holes through which all kinds of “evil spirits” could penetrate to a person were ornamented. Decorative (and at one time magical-incantatory in meaning) elements are located on the gates, around the windows, at the gate; one or another “sacred” image (horse, deer, goddess and birds, sun) crowned the highest point of the house - the roof gable.

“The sum of such amulets, constantly present in all vulnerable areas of the house, turned each “house” into a refuge for all family members inaccessible to the “navi”” (Rybakov B.A. Paganism of Ancient Rus'). Inside the house, all everyday objects were also covered with protective signs, which made it easier to defeat the evil inside the shelter. Traditionally, in the house carvings of the Slavic home, much attention was paid to windows through which the “ubiquitous Navy” could penetrate. Slots in the windows, drafts, winter cold, everything that could cause illness - all this was transformed in the minds of the ancients into images of invisible, intangible “navi”, bringing various misfortunes to people “on the evil winds”. In this regard, such an important element of incantatory decoration arose as the platband, the frame of the window, usually richly saturated with pagan symbolism. Window framing has always been a very significant element, because a window opening is not only a window into the world, into the “white light” for the inhabitants of the hut, but also a peephole for strangers and outside evil forces who can peep through it into life inside the home.

Siberian settlers of the 17th century, exploring Western and Eastern Siberia, carried with them the traditions of house carving of the Russian North and central Russia, which, in turn, were based on ancient Slavic pagan ideas. “The hut of a Russian peasant is not just his home, it is his world, in which the entire universe is reflected and his place in it is determined. The house served as protection, protected. These ornaments and details are requests and wishes addressed to the forces of nature and symbolizing the unity of man with it” (Opolovnikov A.V., Opolovnikova E.A. Tree and Harmony).

Ethnographic studies indicate a stable and widespread image of the “heavenly abysses” of the “upper sky” - wavy lines on the ledges of house roofs. The most common is a wavy pattern, or a pattern of “towns”, which from a distance are perceived as waves. Usually the waves come in two rows, as if emphasizing the depth of the abysses. Very often, along with wavy lines, small circles are depicted, apparently symbolizing raindrops, those “piles” that, according to pagans, were the cause of life on Earth. “Dewy breast” - “drops of dew, life-giving moisture from heaven. Russian pagans believed in the 12th–13th centuries that dew falling from heaven in the form of a fog-cloud was sent by the sky god Rod precisely as the all-generating moisture of life” (Rybakov B.A. Craft of Ancient Rus').

We know about the existence of piers with images of wavy streams in the Novgorod, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Yaroslavl regions, in Russian villages of Karelia and in a number of other places in central Russia, the north of the country and Siberia.

The balks of Russian huts were decorated in two to four rows; we see the same order on the cornice and balks of Prokopyev’s house (late 19th century). The top row is occupied by a zigzag line, which was an archaic and stable ideogram of water, in this case - “heavenly abysses”, inaccessible rain reserves. The system for constructing the decor of the huts was that two inextricably linked ideas were carried out: firstly, the presence in the upper sky (above the firmament) of reserves of rainwater (zigzags and meanders), and secondly, the transfer of this water down to the ground to the plowmen, shown through the mythological symbol of the breasts of heavenly goddesses, irrigating the earth with “birthing heaps of dew.”

The widespread existence of this system throughout the Russian North allows us to consider the rows of patterns of Russian piers on the 19th-century huts located in the museum not as a random set of ornamental techniques, but as a relic of ancient cosmological ideas about the heavens giving rain.

This ancient picture of the world was observed with amazing rigor in the system of architectural decoration, which was a repetition of the macrocosm in the microcosm of the Slavic home; The path of the sun across the sky is emphasized by the fact that to display solar signs in the appropriate zone, artificial, special “towel” boards, which did not play any constructive role, were used, descending vertically from the piers. Solar signs on these “towels” were placed below the zone of celestial waters of the piers, against the background of a pediment shaded by the roof.

The midday sun was depicted on the façade of the hut at the very top, under the figure of the dominant horse, but still below the “heavenly abyss” that was the upper sky.

The ramparts - projections up to 1.5 meters of two or three upper logs of the frame - served to support the roof, extended far forward from the main facade. Folds have always been a very important structural detail of Russian huts. Just like the ohlupen, traditionally the fells had the appearance of a horse's head. The image of the head is not always naturalistic; sometimes only by the characteristic curvilinear shape one can guess that the fells are carved in the form of “sun horses” with legs in the shape of semi-roller clusters. This form of felling with half-rollers (from two to six pieces) is typical specifically for the Siberian huts of Russian settlers. Its semantic meaning is immediately clear, because the horse is a symbol of the sun - a solar sign, the main “defender” of the Russian hut from evil forces.

From the second half of the 19th century, artistic processing of platbands became widespread in Siberia. Rural Siberian craftsmen loved to decorate platbands with geometric patterns. The predominant motifs were solar rosettes (semicircles), rhombuses, and circles. Baroque-style platbands are especially common in the cities and villages of Siberia. Siberian village platbands differ from urban baroque platbands in that most often, instead of a flowerpot and a baluster, complex geometric, zoomorphic, anthropomorphic elements or a solar rosette are placed between the volutes in the middle of the composition.

Siberian village craftsmen, knowing the basic compositional elements of Slavic house carvings, introduced their own ornamental motifs borrowed from urban architecture of the mid-19th century. And although the ancient magical meaning of the ornament of house carvings was practically forgotten by the end of the 18th century, its main motives and methods of placing ornamental elements remained almost unchanged and were passed down from generation to generation by woodcarvers, builders and carpenters. This is especially clearly seen in the example of wooden house carvings preserved in the Siberian outback.

Horizontal ornaments of carved house carvings

As soon as people began to live in wooden houses, a craving for beautiful decor immediately began to awaken in them. Over time, they began to want to decorate their homes with what they thought was quite beautiful. This was done in order to scare away other peoples, as well as to emphasize their status and importance.

For the same purposes they decorated their robes. After the arrival of an unusual religion, jewelry began to be created in order to appease the gods: so that it would rain on time, to scare away evil creatures, to get a rich harvest, and much more. After home decor began to turn into a real art that requires skill and patience.

In the summer, people worked in the fields, and on winter days they could afford to spend time on this hobby called carving. Various decorative carvings on the platbands they were considered amulets, ornaments in the form of animals and birds could be cut out, and plant elements were also used for decoration. Now we will look at the topic of house carving.

Later, another branch of wood carving was formed to decorate the facade and platbands of dwellings, which was called house carving.

Russian house wood carving is still in demand today - a modern country estate can be decorated like an ancient mansion. Decoration with carved elements includes not only valances, trims and piers - facade carvings can contain pictures with characters from folk tales or pagan deities.

Material for wood carving should be collected in winter; trees are drier at this time of year, they do not produce sap, which makes the material more pliable. It takes several years to dry the blanks, but you can buy ready-made material in special stores.

How to choose material:

• For interior work, soft tree species such as linden and alder are better suited.
• For external decoration you need to take hard, coniferous species. They are harder to cut, but they last twice as long.

With current tools, hardness is not a problem; for house carvings, they often use a router or a high-quality jigsaw. To make chic products, you don’t need to draw beautifully. The main thing is to hold the tool firmly in your hand and cut correctly and clearly according to the stencil.

Remember that the technique of slotted carving is most often used for external decoration of a home.

For photos with examples of what decorating a house with carvings can look like, see the gallery.

Gallery: house wood carving (25 photos)

Now we find out what tools do you need to take for work?.

Safety rules when working with wood and tools.

It is better to work outside or in simple and ventilated rooms; you should wear safety glasses and a respirator, because shavings and sawdust can easily get into your eyes due to the complexity of the work. For comfortable work, it is quite important to choose the right lighting in order to clearly see all the products and drawings on which you will be working. After all, due to poor lighting, you can damage yourself.

Where to find sketches for wood carving

There are a large number of books freely available in stores where you can find an incredible number of sketches and ideas for house carvings with beautiful and detailed examples of platbands and carvings by folk craftsmen. You can also find original and interesting ideas on the Internet. After choosing a template, you need to adjust it to certain sizes. You can use graphic editors or do everything yourself. You can download ready-made vectors for CNC and laser.

Where to start with home wood carving

We cut out a template from strong cardboard that we previously made with our own hands. This is, as a rule, a small fragment of a pattern that is repeated many times on the platband or other section of a wooden house. You need to trace it with a simple pencil on our sanded block, then move the stencil and trace it as many times as required for the size of our element. It is better to choose a high-quality stencil so that everything turns out smoothly.

After transferring the pattern to the tree, you must first cut out the shape of the product, in other words, the outer contours, then create holes in future cutouts with a drill and expand them to a certain size and shape his main instrument. Indeed, due to the irregular shape of the product, many mistakes can be made.

What will determine the appearance of a product using the house carving technique?

The work is simple, but painstaking, it requires a lot of effort and patience, because the smoother the pattern, the more beautiful the result. Laziness and forgetfulness can ruin your entire work. The main thing is not to forget about carved symmetry: for example, the right and left platband of a window must be cut in a mirror, all patterns must be at the same height and be the same width. The platbands will be done correctly, and the home will turn out to be truly magnificent, it will be nice to look at it.

How to correctly install overlays in certain places

There are several varieties of fasteners for overhead parts. Most often, for this purpose, they take non-through dowels, accurately measuring the distances on the wall and the attached element. In this case, the fastener will not be visible from the outside; it is strong and convenient. There is another method, simpler and more convenient: nailing the elements. There is a significant disadvantage to this method: the nail heads will be very visible and they may begin to rust. To avoid this, the caps are already coated in place with the same regular paint.

As soon as people began to live in caves and huts, a thirst for beauty immediately arose in them. They wanted to decorate their homes with what seemed most attractive to them. This was done in order to scare away other tribes, as well as to show their status and importance. For the same purposes, they decorated themselves. Later, with the advent of the religion of polytheism, decorations began to be made in order to appease the gods: to bring rain on time, to drive away evil spirits, to obtain a harvest, and so on. Much later, home decorating became a real art, requiring skill and perseverance. In the summer, people worked in the fields, and on the short winter days they could indulge in such a hobby as carving. Various ornaments served as amulets, figures of animals and birds were carved, and plant elements were used. We will tell and show everything about house carving and its interesting facts!

Later, a separate branch of wood carving was formed to decorate the facades and trim of houses, which was called house carving.

It is better to collect material for wood carving in winter - the tree is drier at this time of year, and sap does not circulate in it. The blanks are dried for several years, but you can buy ready-made timber in construction and specialized stores.

Soft woods, such as linden and alder, are well suited for interior work, and hard, coniferous woods are good for exterior decoration. They are more difficult to cut, but they last much longer. In addition, with modern tools, hardness is not a big problem: a router or electric jigsaw is often used for house carvings. To make beautiful products, you do not need to have the ability to draw. You just need to hold the tool firmly in your hand and cut clearly according to the stencil.

It should be noted that the technique of slotted carving is most often used for exterior home decoration.

Before you start carving for your home: tools, tips, preparation.

First you need to purchase a tool. This can be a manual or electric jigsaw with a set of files or a router. You will also need a drill, sandpaper, and varnish or paint suitable for outdoor work; brushes for them.

It is necessary to measure all parts of the house that are to be decorated. According to the dimensions, select bars 1.5-2.5 cm thick. It is important to ensure that they are made of hard wood and do not have cracks, knots or chips.

Safety precautions when working with wood and power tools.
You should work outdoors or in well-ventilated areas, preferably wearing safety glasses and a respirator: shavings and sawdust can get into your eyes and lungs, which should be avoided. For ease of work, it is also very important to have good, uniform lighting in order to see all the parts and patterns that are to be cut.
Where to find designs for home exterior wood carvings.
There are a huge number of books in the public domain and in stores where you can find a huge number of sketches and ideas for house carvings with photos and examples of the work of folk craftsmen. No less interesting solutions can be found on the Internet. Once the template is selected, it must be adjusted to the required dimensions. You can use graphic editors or do it yourself.


Where to start with home wood carving with your own hands.
A template, previously drawn or printed from the Internet, is cut out of thick cardboard. This is, as a rule, a small fragment of a pattern that is repeated many times on a platband or other element of the house. It must be traced with a pencil on a prepared and pre-sanded block, after which the stencil must be moved and traced as many times as required by the size of the future decorative element.

After the “pattern” is transferred to the tree, you first need to cut out the shape of the product, that is, the external contours, then drill holes in future cutouts with a drill and expand them to the desired size and shape with your main tool.

What determines the result and appearance of the product using the house carving technique? The work is simple, but painstaking; it requires patience and accuracy, because the smoother the pattern, the better the result looks. It is important to remember about symmetry: for example, the right and left frames of the window must be cut in mirror images, all patterns must be at the same height and the same width. In this case, the house will turn out to be truly beautiful, it will be pleasant to look at and impossible to take your eyes off.

How to correctly install the overlay elements in their places

Parts must be coated with paint or varnish before installing them.

There are several types of fasteners for overhead elements. Usually, non-through dowels are used for this, precisely measuring the distances on the wall and the attached part. In this case, the fastener will not be visible from the outside, it is reliable and convenient. There is another option, easier and more convenient: nail the part. The downside to this method is that the nail heads will be visible and may rust over time. To prevent this, the hats are already in place coated with the same paint as the decorative element itself.

A selection of videos on the topic of the article

One of the most striking folk crafts is house carving, a characteristic feature of facades in ethnic style. The front part of the house is decorated with combinations of plant and geometric patterns, animal figures, and intricate plots. The artistic composition is applied to a wooden surface using a special carpentry tool. Thread elements are usually removable. After applying the image, the carved parts are applied to the platbands and roofing blades. The exception is columns and house doors, when the carving is applied directly to part of the building.

The choice of wood species suitable for making house carvings yourself is large. Wood is the most commonly used material among folk craftsmen. The most popular species are linden, oak, birch, walnut, pear, and alder. They have the following qualities:

Coniferous wood is not easy to use to decorate your home with home carvings. They are fibrous and prone to cracking, but are also popular due to their low cost and pliability. With a competent approach to wood processing, house carvings made of coniferous wood can remain intact for years.

The main feature of wood carving on platbands, roofs, and facades of houses is the frequent repetition of the storyline and ornaments on different parts of the building. There are several techniques used to decorate houses with carvings. The most common methods are:

It is better to master the basics of house carving from the last type of woodwork, gradually developing skills and mastering more complex techniques. The tree should be chosen within the average price category. The first attempts are unlikely to be so successful as to waste valuable types of wood on carved decorations for a wooden house, and low-quality cheap raw materials may discourage the desire to develop skills.

Before starting any woodworking, you must study the safety rules. The protection of life and health is based on them. For carpentry they are:

• Work is carried out either in the fresh air or in a room with good ventilation.
• A prerequisite is the presence of protective gloves. The respiratory organs are protected from dust with a respirator; when working with the tool, goggles are worn to protect the visual organs from foreign bodies.
• The room should be well lit; it is better to work during daylight hours.

To work, you need to prepare equipment - a jigsaw with a set of files or a router. Additionally, you may need a set of sandpaper of different grades for polishing, an electric or hand drill. At the decorating stage, brushes of different shapes, thicknesses, varnish, and a set of wood paints will be useful.

All parts of the house on which decorative elements will be located must be carefully measured. If artistic skills allow, you can draw a preliminary design of a decorated house, observing the proportions. After this, you can start purchasing wood for work: it is better if it is purchased from a warehouse, dry - then it will not need to be “matured” first. The wood is selected without visible defects. For overhead elements, the thickness of the board should be about 2.5 cm. Next, you can begin to develop detailed sketches of decorative elements.\

Craftsmen who do not have artistic talent are advised to find ready-made templates in specialized literature - they can easily be copied onto paper at the required scale. Sketches of wood carvings with a house pattern can be easily developed in any of the graphics utilities. The sketch is drawn manually in full scale on specially lined paper with a pencil or pen with a special nib - it can be purchased in art stores.

When the sketch is ready, its contours are transferred to thick cardboard and a stencil is cut out. Next, along the cut out contour, the drawing is transferred to a wooden blank using a simple pencil. If the pattern is an ornament, the operation is repeated several times, moving the sheet of cardboard. After applying the drawing, you can carry out the actual work. Regardless of the chosen technique, the contours of the design are first outlined, and then the relief is applied.

Before installation, carved elements are painted and covered with a layer of varnish to prevent premature destruction of the composition. The easiest way to attach a part is to nail it with an ordinary nail.. The hats must be camouflaged by painting them to match the wood. Carved elements attached with dowels look more aesthetically pleasing. They are not visible from the outside, but the strength of such fastening is high.

Despite the fact that the construction market is flooded with a variety of wood adhesives for external work, it is not recommended to use them. There are no guarantees that the adhesive mixture will provide sufficient strength. Do not forget about the two golden rules of successful decoration with carvings: the principle of specularity must be observed in the ornaments; before final installation, it is extremely important to check the symmetry of the attached parts.

Mastering the craft requires scrupulousness, balance, thoroughness, and leisurely execution of work. The result of the efforts of the master of home wood carving with his own hands is not only beautiful from an artistic point of view, but also large-scale. Any mistake in work can cost many weeks of work; sometimes mistakes cannot be corrected.

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Wooden Rus'... From time immemorial, houses, huts and entire farmsteads have been built from wood. This was done for the sake of human life, so that Russian people would have a place to lay their heads and spend the winter in warmth. And live on your own, and provide housing for your livestock. There was plenty of stone and enough clay, but everything was built from wood, since wood is a warm, living material, endlessly grateful, cool in the hut in summer, warm in winter. This is how entire wooden cities, villages and villages appeared in the Russian expanses. And where people live, churches are built, large and small, cathedrals with chapels, parishes and presences.

Life requires beauty. The peasant's wooden house, although well built, looks simple and unpretentious. Carpenters began to invent decorations, create ornaments, boards with carved patterns, “towels,” valances and piers. House carvings appeared. The architect's tools included only an ax and a chisel and chisel. However, hunting is greater than captivity, since you really want to carve something beautiful, then the hatchet can be sharpened so that it rings, and the carving from under it will come out thin and intricate. Real master decorators appeared and with them house wood carving, applied art, which gave carvers a wide field for creativity. Competitions have begun to see who can cut wood better, cleaner and faster.

This all happened in time immemorial. Today, woodcarvers, specialists in such an art form as house carving, have a wonderful set of tools, and there are no tasks impossible for them. Fine technologies are varied, from simple flat-surface carving to through ornamental carving with a complex interweaving of patterns. The “Tatyanka” artistic carving method is indispensable for translating natural scenes with leaves, grass, and flowers into wood. Baroque carvings are used to frame church iconostases. And the facades of residential wooden houses are decorated with slotted valance boards.

Every owner of his own home is concerned about the attractiveness of the facade of his home. I would like the house to be decorated according to the principle of exclusivity, with unique carved patterns. The greatest degree of uniqueness is provided by the so-called Gorodets house carving. This technique combines the deep relief “Tatyanka” with its inherent natural subjects, which are reflected in Gorodets carvings in the form. The rich plant content of Gorodets carvings is most in demand when decorating the facades of wooden houses.

Some masters also willingly use Art Nouveau ornaments from the order of stone architecture in their work. Their elegance and practicality perfectly suit the tasks

Currently, wood carving is coming into fashion in the form of bas-relief sculptures carved from hard wood. The image turns out to be half recessed into the surface of a wall or panel of the house. The visual surround effect is amazing. This technique makes it possible to reproduce bas-reliefs on any theme, Chinese and Japanese, African and Latin American; the choice of subjects is unlimited. Sculptural bas-reliefs can be combined with other carvings, for example, artistic openwork. Also suitable for the exterior design of a house is an overhead house carving without a through cut, the elements of which are glued using waterproof glue.