Advanced Carving: Venice Room (part 1) workshops 1-12

A large architectural carving panel is started by gluing up layers to the finished depth, sawing the outline through a full size paper pattern, then roughing the whole third dimension in with the biggest gouge you own. Details are drawn afterwards, once the form is already right, and never before.

Would you like to see what a paid commission actually looks like before the pretty part starts? Do you want to know how deep a blank has to be glued before you can carve a shell into it? Does it interest you where a power tool honestly belongs in hand work? Workshops 1 through 12 open the Venetian room, and they open it at the ugly end.

I had not shown my production work before this. Two reasons. I did not know whether anybody wanted to watch it, and not every client wants the world seeing what they are paying for. This one agreed, so here it is: a whole room, mid 1400s Venice, and my own bench with the chips still on it.

What the first twelve workshops actually cover

• One board, ten feet of it. About 300 cm long, and the caption on my own video says 21 and 7/16 inches wide, 54.5 cm.
• Layers glued to six inches, heading for nine. The middle of the panel needs every bit of that depth for its shell.
• Pattern printed at full size, pinned down, sawn round.
• Then the biggest gouge I own, and no detail drawing at all until the form is settled.
• I cannot be a millimetre out. The framing in that room is waiting on my board, and nobody builds it until I am done.

Why can a carving be Venetian but not Italian?

Venice was a town, and in the 1400s a carver lived in his town and stayed there. Saying Italian design is not accurate. Neither is saying German or French. Every town had its own men, and those men worked out their own approaches, not just to the workmanship but to the design itself. Wisemen, I call them. They travelled, they looked, they brought ideas home, and then they did it their own way.

Here is proof you can go and touch. Look at furniture made by the first European carvers in Pennsylvania, then look at Boston work of the same period. Both carved the same shell. Put the two shells side by side and they are not the same shell. Even the shading differs, even which side got shaded. And that is only about 300 years ago, inside one country. Now think about Venice in the 1400s.

My client asked specifically for research. Not a nice carving in a general old style, but the details those particular men used, in that city, in the middle of that century. So I researched, drew, designed and built a 3D model until we all agreed it looked authentic. And when I say we, I mean high ranking designers and architects, people at PhD level in historical ornament, checking and rechecking. Which is why I keep saying authentic instead of old-looking, and why I want it authentic but never rustic.

How thick does a blank get glued for work like this?

Layers, and more layers than you would guess. My first layer is about two inches thick and runs the full length. Then a second, then a third, off camera because it is the same operation three times. By the time I pick a gouge up, the board is six inches thick, and where it meets the ceiling it will reach nine.

If you want to know why I glued so much on at the start, look at the centre of the panel. A big shell sits there, and a shell needs somewhere to go. The whole board also has to rise gradually from the wall to the ceiling, so most of that thickness gets carved away rather than kept. Thickness is not waste. It is what lets me excavate as deep as the design wants without losing the flow of the thing.

Even at the setting in stage I am an inch down, 25 mm, at the deepest spot. And I still leave meat. That word keeps coming up in these twelve workshops: leave some meat, because you do not yet know the final look, and material you have kept is a decision you have not had to make.

How do you get a full size pattern onto a board this long?

A printer at the local FedEx office, which is not the answer people expect. I have thought about buying a plotter and I still see no advantage worth the floor space. The drawing itself came out of CAD, plus Rhino and Blender, the open source one, and I pulled it as a wireframe because wireframe gives me a perfect line. It also gives me a confusing tangle of extra lines, and I confuse myself with them on camera more than once.

Paper goes down on push pins, not glue, so I can lift it and reuse it. My super glue was slow to grab, so the sheets ended up on green Scotch tape instead, with a thin double sided tape as the other option. Then I outline with a knife and an 8B pencil. Very soft, so the line comes quick. Carbon paper would work and I avoid it, because carbon paper leaves black dirt everywhere.

I keep the paper afterwards. Same drawing becomes the pattern for the corbel later, and I measure off it with calipers. It does not ask me to feed it, so it stays.

Where does a machine honestly belong in hand carving?

Machines belong exactly where they cost you nothing at all, and nowhere else. Those men in Venice would have used a bow saw, and being authentic to them is the whole brief, and I still reach for a jigsaw. This is production work and I have to be smart. The carving is all by hand. The outline is not carving. I have already broken that rule anyway by running the boards through a planer that takes 25 inches.

The board sits on four Rockler bench cookies, rubber both sides, which lift it just enough for the blade to travel underneath and stop it sliding while I saw. My bench that day is a tool chest with a wood top on wheels, because on ten feet of board I need to walk round rather than reach across.

Tool and size	What it does on a big blank	Its job	Why nothing else does it here
Number seven gouge	Takes off a good half inch each pass	Bulk removal	A plane would take a year
Reground number nine	Long bevel, enters with almost no force	Setting in	Straight down, holds the drawn line
Thirty ounce mallet	Heavy enough to drive, soft on handles	Driving force	Brass and wood both punish handles
Small handmade hatchet	Removes waste about as fast as gouges	Fast roughing	Only where the wood is doomed
Jigsaw and pattern	Follows the paper line at ninety degrees	Outline only	Authentic, and far slower than this
Number one chisel	Shaves the saw line off an edge	Edge cleanup	Nothing smaller reaches that far

Three things about the saw matter more than the saw. First, the blade has to be dead square, so I check it before I go near the line, and if it is off I stay an eighth of an inch away and clean up later. Second, blades cut in a direction: mine is a fast progressive one that cuts upward and lifts the fibres, and a nicer blade would cut downward and press them in. I use the fast one anyway and pay for it with a rougher edge.

Third, and almost nobody mentions this, the orbital action has four settings. Zero, one, two, three. Set it to three and the blade shakes hard, eats wood fast, and leaves an edge you would not show anybody. I leave it on zero all day and the cut comes out almost perfect. The clear shroud on the Festool is not a finger guard either, whatever it looks like. Hook it to the extractor and it becomes a dust hood.

I killed a blade during the recording by twisting it in six inches of lime. Wrong blade for that thickness, and I said so out loud rather than cutting it out of the video.

What the saw leaves me is about a thirty second of an inch of glue line standing proud, what I call the marriage line. A number one chisel takes it off in one pass. You could go further, make a plywood template, saw 3/16 away and route to it, and it would be beautiful. Most of that edge is going to be carved off anyway, so I do not.

What does establishing the form actually mean?

Establishing the form is step one, and it means the board is right in three dimensions before a single detail exists on it. I take the biggest gouge I own, a number seven, three and an eighth of an inch, 80 mm across, and a rubberised mallet weighing 30 ounces, and I remove a great deal of wood.

The mallet is rubber for one reason. Wood is noisy and brass beats the tool ends up when you are hogging material, and I want these gouges to look the same in twenty years as they do today.

A Russian viewer on Instagram asked why I did not just plane it flat. If I planed this I would still be planing next year. One pass with that 80 mm gouge takes half an inch off. I also carve along the grain here, which I do not normally like and would not tell you to copy, and in this case the whole surface has to slope away so it does not matter.

A small hatchet does much the same job, and I own a beautiful handmade one. Either way the point holds: get the shape, ignore the mess, and do not clean anything yet.

After that comes what some carvers call setting in and others call roughing in. My number nine, 20 mm, reground years ago with a long bevel, drops into lime with almost no push behind it. Straight down cuts, on the line, deep, and no undercutting whatsoever. Undercut this early and the detail you were protecting is the thing you lose.

Being authentic in this room also decides my tool rack. Mostly gouges and veiners, and I try to keep the V tool out of it altogether, because that is how the work was done. And when the wood starts chipping I stop and come at it from the other side. Cutting on into a marriage line splits it, and a split at this stage is the sort of mistake that cannot be fixed once a piece has gone fragile.

Which measurement can you not afford to get wrong?

Everything hangs on the first one. My line has to sit exactly one and seven eighths of an inch in from the edge, on both ends of a ten foot board, and if I am one millimetre out here it adds up into something ugly ten feet away. A harder reason sits underneath that one, though. The framing inside that room is being built to my design, and the builders are not framing it until my board is finished. My millimetre is their wall.

So I measure, remeasure, check, double check, triple check. My grandpa said it a hundred times and he was right. Measure seven times, cut once.

And I do not draw the fine detail at this stage at all. Those flowers are more or less free form and can move. If it were architectural acanthus, where the movements have to be exact, outlining before the form existed would be the real error. The three dimensional world comes first and the drawing follows it, not the other way about.

What did your teacher say about bad wood?

My teacher gave me one line that has outlasted everything else he told me, and I had earned it. I was complaining about the stock. Complaining about the wood, the grain, all of it, exactly the way students complain to me now. So you are in good company there.

He told me there is no such thing as bad wood. There are only dull tools.

Which is why buffing happens on camera in the middle of a workshop instead of being edited out. Outside bevel on the Koch paper wheels with blue paste, inside bevel on the Tormek with green, and I do not love the green because it makes a mess. A new gouge gets reshaped before it earns a place, and the reshaped ones cut better because the bevel is longer. Everything about that lives in the sharpening course.

My favourite tools, after all these years and for no reason I can fully defend, are Ashley Iles. I keep coming back to them. There is also a number nine in that drawer marked 14 mm which measures nearer 16, five eighths, and I have no idea why the maker stamped it that way. Close enough. And a knife on the bench from BeaverCraft, sent to me with a leather tool roll that arrived from Ukraine. Prettiest roll I have ever owned. I hardly use it. It comes out when I teach somewhere in person.

One more habit that took me years to admit to. I do not swap hands. My gouge lives in my left hand and stays there, so instead of reversing my grip I walk round the bench, or roll the bench, until the cut comes at me the right way. Other carvers swap and it works fine for them. It has never worked for me.

Twelve workshops in, the panel looks rough enough that a stranger would think something had gone wrong. Nothing has. The form is right, the shell has its depth, the claws sit where they belong, and every detail is still ahead. Workshops 13 through 25 take the head, and the block after that carries on into the shell.

If you want the thinking rather than the copying, that is Principles of Design, and the panel design course walks the same road on a piece you can actually finish at home. Never held a gouge? Start with first cuts or the cutting board, then come back here. Everything above is inside the tuition, and the tools course and the questions I get asked most sit beside it.

Those men in Venice never drew a perfect line in their lives. Go and look at the Ca d Oro and the relief work of that period and you will see it: exaggerated, uneven, extra lines everywhere, and beautiful. My work is not a copy of theirs. I am designing new work in their language, which is harder and more honest, and it starts with a six inch stack of lime and a very large gouge. Pick something to carve. Shall we carve?