[Brian T.]

Most of the time, I "see" the form in the wood. Streamlines and stylized animals. Some more realiastic than others. Lots of sketches and some more precise drawings that are applied to the wood with a 4B or 6B pencil and away I go!

Lettering is an art all to its own. Microsoft Office Word has a gazillion fonts. If you don't like the sizes that the software offers, click delete and type in your own. Look for older and more specific British texts on letter carving. I'm on the road, got a couple back home in my library. PM in a week.
All that I can recall is that there is a very specific order in the steps of the letter carving to get it to turn out right.

 

[Brian T.]

Hello O-B. I am home in my village, tucked away in the Rocky Mountains at 53N.

Down in my library, I found 2 carving books with good information on carved lettering.

1. Wood Carving
W. Wheeler & C. Hayward
1979 Sterling Publishing, NY
ISBN 0-8069-8790-1
ch 16 has very good layout and process instructions.

2. Relief Carving
W.F. (Bill) Judt
Fox Chapel Publishing
ISBN 1-56523-097-3
Bill refers to this as "text" and the information is spread across the book. That's OK, there's a bunch of other good stuff on prepping relief panels, too.

I suggest that you try to get either/both of these books through your local library as interlibrary loans.
Failing that, try abebooks.com for used copies, they claim to have 6,000,000 titles in stock. Very efficient outfit to do business with.

 

[Brian T.]

O-B: I suggest that you make a start on a practice piece. Carving a Santa won't familiarize you with the tools needed for lettering. Then learn as you go, how "carving sharp" gets the job done. No matter which sharpening & honing process that you elect to use, stick with it to learn it.

Down in the Hand Tools section, there's a thread started by 'railaw' called "Sharpening Gouges."
In there is a link to a long thread in the Australian sister site called "Star's Sharpening Journey."
What I do, the why's and the wherefore's, runs on, with illustrations, for several pages.