Advanced Carving: Venice Room (Part 10) Workshops 110-121

Piercing a relief carving is a plug cut, driven by a number 9 gouge that gets rotated rather than pushed. You aim it at a target on the far side and meet the hole from both directions. On these Venetian panels that turns a solid block into something that reads as air, and it settles any argument about whether a part was glued on.

Somebody looks at a relief carving with an open leaf standing off the ground and assumes there is a joint hiding under it. Nothing of the kind. Everything you see came out of one board 38 mm thick, an inch and a half, and the only way to prove that is to make daylight come through.

Have you ever carved a leaf that looked heavy no matter how much you took off the background? Have you tried going deeper and watched it get muddy instead of lighter? Depth alone will not do it. At some point the wood has to be gone.

These twelve workshops carve the flowers that are the hero of the whole panel, then frame them with acanthus, and along the way the panel gets holes carved right through it in several places. None of it is strictly necessary. It is what makes the thing look alive from twenty feet away.

What the hole is actually for

• A plug cut is a deep number 9 driven straight in and twisted, so it lifts a plug of wood out instead of shaving it. Rotate, crank, remove. Then go at the same spot from the other side until the two meet.
• The tools are ordinary. Ten millimetres to start, a quarter inch (6 mm) to refine, and 3 mm for the small openings.
• Piercing buys darkness no groove can match. A hole reads black at any hour of the day, in any light you throw at it.
• Lightness costs strength, so pay some back on purpose. Run a piece under a neighbouring leaf, or reinforce with glue thinned with water.
• The flowers get the detail. Everything around them is a frame and gets less, because a frame that shouts is not a frame.

What is a plug cut in wood carving?

A plug cut takes out a cylinder of wood rather than a shaving. Drive a deep sweep gouge, the number 9, straight down into the surface and then rotate the handle. The tool bites a ring, the waste inside snaps loose, and out it comes in a lump. That is why I call it a plug.

My first one on this panel went in with a number 9 at ten millimetres, three eighths of an inch, and a mallet behind it. The sound it makes going deep is a bit frightening, and that is exactly how gouges get broken, so go carefully.

You can hear my granddaughter somewhere behind me on one of these recordings. She was visiting that day and I was not going to stop the camera for her sake or mine.

Once the first hole is open, everything gets easier. A bigger opening lets you angle the tool, so I switched to a quarter inch gouge by Auriou, a French maker, and tipped it toward the exact place I wanted to break through on the other face. Then I walked round and worked back into it from that side.

How do you go through without splitting the panel?

Aim, and then meet the hole halfway from each face. Boring straight through in one direction blows the far side out, because there is nothing left to support the fibres where the tool exits. Working inward from the two faces means every exit happens into wood you already removed.

Grain decides the rest. Where the opening runs along the grain the wood is supported and I can be bold about it. Across the grain I go little by little, and I never force the tool. One division started to give under the tool and I quit right there. Force it and it breaks, and I almost did.

The panel itself is glued up from boards, and the extra thickness is what makes any of this safe. That 38 mm gives me somewhere between 16 mm and the full thickness to play with, so the deepest plug on this piece went about five eighths of an inch, 16 mm, and there was still wood under it.

What happens to your bench when the tool goes through?

Plan the exit before you drive the tool. A gouge that goes all the way through a board keeps going, and what it meets underneath is your bench top.

Two habits handle that. Where the piece lies flat and I only need to suggest the opening, I stop a quarter inch (6 mm) short and leave the waste for later. Afterwards I lay the veiner almost flat against the bench and clear that last bit sideways, so the tool travels along the surface instead of down into it.

The other habit is simply moving. Shift the piece until the section you are piercing hangs over the edge or sits above a gap, and drive through into air. Slower to set up. Cheaper than a bench.

Working close to the bench is its own trap, and it caught me on the last big concave of this part. I was carving with a 30 mm number 11, the biggest veiner I own, and I stopped early because the wood was thin and the bench sat right underneath. Going further would have been a real mistake, and I said so on camera instead of pretending I planned it.

Before any of these openings I pull the drawing up on the iPad and check what I meant to do in that spot. It takes half a minute, and it is the cheapest thing I do all day. Wood does not come back.

What I opened	The tool that started the opening	How deep	What the hole gives back
Eye of the scroll	Number 9 at ten millimetres with a mallet	All through	Daylight, and proof of one board
Under a leaf	Quarter inch number 9 angled inward	16 mm	A black spot that never fades
Behind a division	Three millimetre number 9 twisted by hand	All through	Weight lifted off the leaf
Beside the pipe	One millimetre veiner, laid on its side	Two mm	An edge that finally reads sharp

Why does a hole beat a deeper groove?

Depth of shadow is limited by the light that can still reach the bottom of a groove. Carve a 5 mm channel and the wood inside it stays visible. Carve through, and there is no bottom for light to land on, so the opening reads black in the morning and black at night.

My ladder for shadow runs 5 mm, then 3, then 2, then 1, all number 11 veiners, each one going deeper into the same line. Every step darkens it a bit more. But the moment the wood is gone entirely, you get something the ladder cannot reach.

Do I need every one of these openings? Not at all. Some are purely for the shadow's sake, and I say that out loud while I carve them. One of them sits where nobody will look twice. I put it in because the piece is more alive with the dark spot than without it.

What keeps a pierced carving from breaking?

Three things hold it, and only one of them is glue. The first is where you put the opening: leave the fibres running along the length of the part rather than across it, and a thin leaf is far tougher than it looks.

The second is design. Elsewhere I had planned a gap and changed my mind, because the piece needed something to hang onto. Tucking that part under the neighbouring acanthus gave it a second anchor, and it still reads as light. Anybody can see through it; nothing can flex it.

The third is glue, thinned with water and left to soak in. That works here because this panel is paint grade. On a stain grade piece the same trick would leave the wood blotchy where the glue soaked in, and blotchy is a mistake you cannot sand out. Know which one you are carving before you reach for the bottle.

Both halves of this wall have to match, and that changes how I hold the tool. Every outline pass is a true 90 degrees straight down with no lean, because the second board carries the same design flipped and the lines have to land in the same places. Undercut one side by accident and the pair will never agree once they are up.

One more payoff comes with it. Once you can see through a leaf from both sides, nobody can tell me I glued that piece on. I still glue a few parts of this project together, and I say where, but the carved ones stand on their own.

How is the flower itself carved?

Begin with a dome and then take the dome apart. Once the outline is down and the field around it has been lowered, the whole flower is a half sphere sitting on the panel. I shape that with a three inch number 7 held upside down, working at it from every position around the bench.

The middle of the flower does not sit in the middle of the dome. Push it off to one side and the flower reads as tilted toward the viewer rather than lying flat, and that single decision does more than any amount of petal work.

Divisions come next, and they are straight down passes, nothing clever about them. I place them by eye, stand back, move one, and only then start shaping. Each petal gets a concave, some get a smaller second one heading toward the centre, and one or two get lifted so the neighbour tucks under.

For the centre I bore a small 7 mm plug, purely to point the direction, then work round it with a punch set. A real seed head carries a texture no gouge will imitate at this scale, and punches give it in about a minute. It is the one spot on this whole panel where I am not carving at all.

Where should you stop adding detail?

Detail belongs where the eye goes first, and on this panel that is the flowers. Everything around them is a frame made of acanthus, and a frame carries fewer marks on purpose. Load the frame with detail and the flowers stop being the subject.

Two other places earn nothing. Anything that ends up facing a wall after installation is never going to meet a human eye, and I skip it and say why. I do not want to spend more time than I have to.

Then I turn round and contradict myself. On one hidden undercut I cleaned it anyway, because I know it is there, and knowing makes me happier. Consistency is not the point. The point is deciding, every time, whether the next hour buys anything.

A rasp is part of that decision. I reached for one on a leaf edge, off camera, and thought why not. The whole panel gets painted, the shape is right, and the rasp saved me the time. Rasp it and forget it.

How many veins belong on a carved leaf?

Fewer than you think. Three or four soft ones running toward the middle line will do more for a leaf than a dozen. Put too many small ones in and it goes busy, and busy does not look rich, it looks awful.

The middle line itself is not down the centre. I take the two edges, step six parts out of ten between them, and run the line there. Same proportion I use for the head of an acanthus and for placing an eye, and the leaf immediately stops looking like a diagram.

Edges get the same restraint and the opposite treatment. A petal edge left straight looks manufactured, so I wave it with a knife. Almost nothing in life runs dead straight. Two or three shallow waves along that edge and the petal turns organic again.

Inside each petal I put one deep concave, sometimes a second smaller one heading toward the centre. Look at a real flower and the petals cup that way. I exaggerate it, because carved at real scale it disappears, and exaggeration is most of what ornament does.

Does a number 3 mean the same thing on every gouge?

Sweep numbers do not match across brands, and it catches people out constantly. A number 2 by Pfeil is roughly the same curve as a number 3 by Ashley Iles or Henry Taylor. In England they count it differently, and neither side is wrong.

Buy by the shape you need, then learn what your maker calls it. My veiners are mostly Pfeil, because to my hand Pfeil does the best job on the number 11s, and I own more of those than everything else combined. My fishtails and some sweeps are Ashley Iles. The first set you buy matters less than getting them properly sharp and keeping them there.

One thing about the number 11 that took me years to use properly. A veiner is a U, which means the side of it works like a flat gouge. Lean the pressure onto one wall of the U and you have a number 3 in your hand without changing tools, which is how I clean a concave without putting the veiner down.

All of this sits on the work in the earlier parts of the room. If you have not seen how depth gets measured before the first pass, or how the angle of the flute decides a wall, begin there. New to all of it? The plain first steps are here, and full access to every workshop opens the whole room, one hundred and sixty three workshops of it.

None of this is my invention. The room copies the woodwork of Venice at the end of the 15th and the beginning of the 16th century, and that city already knew what an opening does to ornament. Stone tracery on the Ca d Oro is pierced clean through, and the whole front of the building changes as the light moves across it. Wood will do the same trick on a smaller scale, and my only job is to keep the thing standing while it does.

Would you rather carve deeper, or carve through?

Shall we carve?