Carving small fish, whales, dolphins and even seals is a great way to get started in the world of stone carving. One of the advantages of carving these animals is that they are all naturally smooth, with the exception of some scale patterns on fish, they have simply shaped appendages and one uniform body shape.
Draw the outline of the animal that you are carving onto the stone first. You should try and draw an outline on each side of the stone. For instance, draw the profile of the animal on the left and right sides, a simplified front and back view and a top and bottom outline. This will help you when you cut the pattern out with a saw. Once that is done these simple animals need only to be filed down to the correct shape, sanded and polished.
You can create simple jewelry with soapstone with ease. Try making a small figure for a necklace. You could carve a simple butterfly out of the stone and wrap the piece in a leather thong to hang about your neck. You could also create a small dove shape for someone that is going through a hard time. The advantage of creatures like butterflies and simple birds is that their shape is not complex and their wings allow you to string the stone craving up on a necklace without having to try and drill through your carving.
If you have a chess enthusiast in your life, you can create chess pieces with your soapstone carving skills. Chess pieces are great because the pieces themselves are highly stylized symbols that are not typically overwrought with details. This will allow you to draw a pattern of a something like a horse head with a small base at the bottom on your soapstone block. A pattern like this can be created easily by just tracing the left and right profile onto the block with a pencil and cutting it out. Once out of the stone, some minor shape refining needs to be done using small rasp.
After you have carved out the basic shape for your project you will need to refine the shape to create the best piece possible. A small stone carving rasp can be used with a back and forth motion to slowly remove any excess stone and give a rounded shape to areas like animal snouts and tails. Be careful when making thin appendages like tails as these can easily crack if you don't work with slow care.
You can sand the entire sculpture with a coarse grit sandpaper and then move to a higher grit sandpaper to make the sculpture increasingly smooth if you wish. To make the carving even smoother you can sand the stone while it is wet. Rubbing oil into your finished piece can lock in shine and show off the colors of the stone material.