Just discovered a fun new carving trick today. I've always been annoyed by the difficulty of creating clean curvy trenches with a nice sharp corner to the bottom of them, as I often desire in relief carvings. So, it occurred to me that a chisel blade could be used as a scraper, and get in much tighter places than a card scraper. Works like a charm.
So, pull and scrape, rather than push and cut. In the picture, I'm pulling toward the camera, toward the flat side of the chisel.
The bridge still needs a little smoothing, but the trench bottoms are much better than I could get by cutting and sanding
