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The word 'font' refers to a set of printed letters, numbers and other symbols of the same style. It's a printing, computing term and has a different etymology from the font used in churches. Lettercarving in stone and wood began and continued for the longest time using a limited number of alphabet styles based principally around Trajan Roman. However, with the advent of printing, you can see carvers picking up new shapes from the new, computer-based fonts.
What we are doing here in no way replaces a deep understanding of those antecedent letterforms and is a sort of 'down and dirty' way of piggy-backing on what's around. An important point to grasp here is that we are still using the same sorts of carving techniques as we would carving one of classical letterforms.
There are now, literally, thousands of fonts available for free online; every graphics student seems to design several as part of their coursework! But not all fonts are suitable for carving. To me, a 'good' carving font or alphabet seems not only to fit carving tools like a glove but needs the use of just a few.
These fonts I've chosen here (details in the download) are bold and easy to carve, with just a couple of tricky bits, and look great on these candle holders. Feel free to change the text, colour etc. It's a good weekend project with big impact and present-giving possibilities...
If you are not used to lettering, do have a look at other, more introductory, lettercarving videos on our site. Here for example.
Warning: Never have the candle sitting directly in the wood. The melting wax soaks in and if the candle burns too low the whole wooden candleholder can become a flaming wick. Always have some metal holder or cup between candle and wood.
Fonts: There are many sites online from which you can download fonts to install in you computer. The ones I used are free for non-commercial use here:
