You asked about books. I have quite a few, but I d suggest these as a start:
Caricature Carving From Head To Toe - Dave Stetson
Tom Wolfe Carves Woodspirits and Walking Sticks - Tom Wolfe
Carving Crazy Critters - Gary Batte
Carving Caricature Animals - Desiree Hajny
Also, The Woodcarving Academy at
https://woodcarvingacademy.com/ I have taken two online carving classes from Dave Stetson and learned a lot. Some comments above about not learning by watching, I ll have to disagree with. The classes were using Zoom online in nominally 2 hour sessions. Dave went into a lot of explanations of why he was doing what he was doing. The whole session was recorded, and after it was over, in a few hours, it was available online. I did not attempt to carve while Dave was live, although some others did. What I could do, is watch the class session again, pausing it after a minute or so, and then carve what he just explained. This is one of the class projects:
https://www.lumberjocks.com/projects/417034
There are many more carvers on the Woodcarving Academy web site who are very good and have many varied carvings to teach.
Claude
- ClaudeF