Owen Mercer
A small place
to start making.
DREVAN was created around a simple editorial idea: make the first stages of hand carving easier to navigate.
A smaller route in.
The beginning can feel crowded with tools, techniques and impressive finished pieces. Our collection takes a smaller route. Prepare a useful working space. Learn through deliberate practice. Choose a modest project. Then give the final surface some thought.
Those stages shape our four digital workshop guides. Each has a distinct purpose, with practical notes and an understated visual style inspired by workshop manuals.
- 01PrepareA useful working space, before a larger kit.
- 02PractiseDeliberate repetition, with something to notice each time.
- 03MakeA modest project whose whole shape you can hold in view.
- 04FinishThe surface, the colour and the care of the object.
The form before the detail.
Most of a small carving is decided before anything looks like anything. The guides keep returning to the broad shape: the blank, the form inside it and the planes that give it character.
The bird is one of the eight projects in edition 03. The point of the drawing is the order: the silhouette and the broad form come a long way before the eye, and nothing here is a tool-handling demonstration.
Meet Owen Mercer.
Owen is the voice behind the DREVAN editions: the one who decides what belongs on a page, which stage a question really belongs to and when a note is more useful than another photograph.
He writes the way the guides are meant to be read — slowly, with a blank in front of you. The tone is his: concrete about the wood, unhurried about progress, and content to say that a piece is finished when you have learned what it had to teach.
The guides are editorial. They set out a way of beginning and a set of things to notice; they are not professional instruction, a qualification or a substitute for complete tool-handling guidance and the directions that came with your own equipment.
At the bench
A small working area is enough.
Edition 01 spends most of its pages here: light, a surface, somewhere to sit and a clear space around your hands. Not a workshop — a corner you can set up and clear away.
- ADaylight along one side, so the facets you have cut are visible as you work.
- BA steady surface at a height that lets your shoulders drop.
- CA clear space around your hands, with nothing you have to reach across.
- DThe blank, turned and looked at before any plan is made.
- EThe knife, kept sheathed whenever it is not in your hand.
- FA notebook and a pencil: what you intended, what happened, what to change.
- GSomewhere for the shavings, emptied before they spread.
- HRoom to set the piece down and look at it from another angle.
A plan, not a safety diagram. Follow complete tool-handling guidance and the instructions for your own equipment before carving.
We value the process as much as the finished object.
Noticing the form, reviewing the surface and carrying one useful lesson into the next piece. A small collection of objects made slowly says more about a year of carving than a single ambitious figure.
That is why the four guides stay separate. You can come back to the stage you need instead of reading the same broad introduction four times over.
What DREVAN is, and what it is not.
Four English PDF editions on small decorative whittling: the setup, the practice, eight projects and the finish. Preparation sheets, observation notes and planning pages, written to be used with a blank in front of you.
Not furniture making, power carving, axe work, survival or bushcraft instruction, and not a professional qualification. No awards, rankings, customer numbers or endorsements are claimed, and no finish is certified here for food contact or for children’s toys.
Start small. Shape something of your own.
Four workshop editions: first setup, practice, eight small projects and the finish.
Every DREVAN guide is a digital PDF ebook in English. Book-shaped images are visual previews of the proposed editions. No physical book, knife, wood, protective equipment or other materials are included or shipped.
Carving involves sharp tools. Follow complete tool-handling guidance and the instructions for your own equipment before carving, and keep knives away from unsupervised children. Cut-resistant equipment is an additional precaution, never a replacement for correct handling. Finishing depends on the manufacturer’s directions for application, ventilation, drying and disposal.
Start small. Shape something of your own.