Advanced Carving: Venice Room (Part 4) Workshops 38-49

Undercutting is carving away the wood behind an edge so air sits under it and the edge throws a shadow. On a relief panel it is what makes a leaf look like it is lifting off the board instead of glued to it. That comes last, always.

Have you ever looked at old carving and wondered why the leaves sit so close to their background? Does your own relief work read flat once it goes up on a wall? Workshops 38 through 49 are where this panel stops being a surface and starts having a back.

I am one of the ones who undercuts a lot. Plenty of good carvers take the other road and will not go deep at all, and I know their logic. It depends on what the piece has to survive. If a thing is going to be knocked by people every day, then no, do not hollow it out, because it turns fragile. A ceiling is not knocked by anybody.

What the hollow buys, and what it costs

• Air under a rim is what throws the shadow, and one millimetre of it shows from below.
• The old carvers mostly left a wall there. I take it out, and I will tell you below why I think they left it.
• Nothing gets hollowed until the whole design is settled. Semi finished is fine. Finished is too early.
• A back bent gouge is not a luxury here. In some spots no straight shank will fit at all.
• The price is grain. Once there is a ceiling of wood over your cut, you can only work one direction, and it is often the wrong one.
• Where the hollow changes nothing you can see, skip it. All it leaves is a weak spot.

Why did the old carvers leave a wall behind the leaf?

Look at original work, stone as well as wood, and you find that space still filled in. I call it the wall. Nobody went in behind the leaf, or if they did, not much. People argue about why, and one answer you hear is that leaving it was the more classical look. I doubt that. Just my opinion, and I will say why.

Leaving it in is quicker. That is the whole of it, as far as I can tell. The wall still looks good, so nobody was losing a commission over it. Stone is a separate story and a fair one, because stone will not take a deep hollow before the thing snaps. Wood lets you, and in wood an extreme hollow looks better.

Not many people carve acanthus to this degree any more, and I do not know many who still do.

What they did love in Venice was curls. That came out of the research before any wood was glued up: those regional carvers put curls on everything, and it looks rich. Later on the same movements were picked up in France by furniture makers and architects. Started in Italy, carried into France, and the movements I am carving here are the ones that travelled.

Here is the part that costs me something to say. In the workshops before these I explained the round gouge tip of this period by pointing at the stone carvers, and I accepted that reasoning. Now the same reasoning turns up to explain the wall, and I refuse it. Same argument, opposite verdict, one course later. You are allowed to notice that. Go and hear the earlier version and decide which of us is right.

How far behind a relief carving should you go?

Deep enough that the shadow closes and no deeper. My own target is complete shadow, where you cannot see in no matter how you move your head, and on this panel that came to about a quarter of an inch, 6 mm, past the first pass. Kill one of the lamps and it shows immediately. Without it the leaf simply is not three dimensional.

A second kind of hollow exists, though, and I refuse that one every time. In a lot of places I do not have to go in far, and I do not, because it serves nothing you can actually see. The look is identical either way. All it leaves behind is a weak spot, and a weak spot is not an advantage in anything. That judgement is most of the skill, and it is the same judgement my design course spends its time on.

Where it goes	What the hollow is actually for	Typical depth	The risk you take on with it
Edge of a leaf	air behind it so the rim throws a hard shadow	one millimetre	almost none, the rim stays thick
Under a flipping lobe	the lobe reads as if it lifted off	half an inch	the tip turns fragile in a hurry
A bored eye	a plug cut leaves a hole no light enters	a quarter inch	the wall around it can come loose
Flat background field	nothing at all, the look does not change	leave it	a weak spot for no gain

When in the job does the hollowing happen?

Later. Always later, and I say so three separate times across these twelve workshops. Until the whole thing is developed, the shell and everything around it, no final hollows get carved, for one plain reason: I might still change something. Semi finished is acceptable. Finished finished is too soon. Cut the air in behind a detail you later decide to move and you have nothing left to move it into.

I got tired of one area and left it for another day.

That ordering also protects you from yourself. I am the man who gets absorbed in one spot for an hour, and there is a saying in Russian for what happens then, which translates as soaping the eye. Work one detail long enough and your eye grows used to it, and you stop seeing what is going wrong. So I jump to another area and come back. The Russians named that, not me.

Which gouge reaches under an overhang?

A bent one. I lean on back bents heavily through this stretch because in some places there is absolutely no other way to clean underneath and still make the detail beautiful. No other tool fits. This is in the way and that is in the way, and yet the work still has to happen under there. A 10 mm number 1 back bent, flat as a chisel and curved along its shank, is the one I reach for most in those spots.

Do not oversell it to yourself, though. What a back bent gives you is access where a straight tool would be blocked, and even so there are limits. Not bingo every time. The half inch medium bent spoon by Ashley Iles gets into the volute, and there are still corners of this board where I put the tools down and leave the spot for another day.

Why does going in behind force you against the grain?

The roof you just made is what does it. Once wood arches over your cut, the tool cannot come at the fibres from the far side, so one direction is all you get, and it is frequently the direction the grain would rather you avoided. I break that rule openly in workshop 49 and say so while I am doing it. No clever way round it exists, and wishing for one wastes an afternoon, because the roof is the whole object of the exercise.

What makes it survivable is the edge. My bevel on some of these is 16 mm long, really, really long, and it slices through the fibres instead of crushing them. Sharp like a surgeon's tool. You could shave with it. Working the wrong way along the grain with a dull edge tears the surface into fuzz; the same pass with a long sharp bevel leaves a face you would not want to sand. My sharpening course is where that edge comes from.

What is a plug cut, and why will a veiner not make one?

A plug cut is a hole rotated out of the wood with a gouge rather than a drill bit. Set a number 9 down, turn it through a full circle, and the cut ends exactly where it began, because a number 9 is a true half round. Lift the plug out and you have a cavity that no slicing pass could reach. Every later cut can then run over the top of it.

Try the same thing with a number 11 and it will not work. A veiner is a letter U, not a radius, so it cannot rotate, and if you do not know that difference the tool will simply refuse. A gouge is always the true radius; a veiner is always the U. Number 8 rotates too. In the workshops just before these the number 11 did nearly everything, and here is the one job it cannot touch.

The point of the whole operation is one thing: a shadow deep enough that the eye gives up. About a quarter of an inch in and the hole is dark from every angle. Extreme shadows are exactly what I am after, and the panel stops looking carved and starts looking built.

How do you carve a ceiling nobody sees straight on?

You carve it for the angle it will actually be seen from, which is underneath. Part of this board will only ever be visible if somebody stands at the far end of the room, and it still gets the work, because you are not always in a bed. Another part faces a person lying down, and that part gets checked from below constantly, since something can look perfectly right head on and be wrong from the floor.

So the question in front of every decision is not whether a shape is good. The question is whether the shape will be visible at all, and whether a tool can even get there. Distance also sets the detail budget. The far end of a panel gets less, because nobody will resolve it; the end that comes near the eye gets a lot more. On one leaf I looked from below and saw I needed to take an eighth of an inch off, maybe a little less, maybe 3/32, a couple of millimetres only.

What wood is a ceiling panel like this carved from?

Lime, and a viewer called David asked me the same question mid stream. In Europe you call it lime wood, in the United States you will hear other names, and I call it the queen of woods because for carving there is simply nothing better. Long clean fibres, and no fight in it.

Harder species are worth trying, and not for the reason people expect. Work a hard wood and you learn that a very low bevel breaks, so the tool that slices lime beautifully is the wrong tool there. I would not put a 16 mm bevel anywhere near hardwood. It snaps, and easily.

What breaks first when you go too far?

The detail you were protecting. In workshop 42 I moved into a plug again and again without clearing the waste, cranked upward, and loosened the very piece I was shaping. It did not break off. I could feel it move under the tool, and see it move, which is worse. That is not so good, and loose has no repair, where broken does.

Broken I can fix. Another piece came away entirely and I glued it straight back with Titebond 2, then worked a different corner of the board while it dried and came back to it two workshops later. The panel is paint grade, so nothing shows. I also slipped once and damaged an edge, and said out loud that it was not okay, and then fixed it anyway.

Not too happy about that one, but I can live with it.

And I broke a tool. Use a mallet on a spoon gouge and watch what the blade does, because the bent shank acts like a spring, and if you hit it hard at the wrong angle it goes. Ask me how I know. One was one too many, and it gave me a really good lesson.

Does sandpaper belong on a hand carved panel?

Mostly it does not, and the reason is not purity. With genuinely sharp tools you do not need to sand anything, because the surface off the edge is already better than an abrasive will leave it. I do reach for a rasp on one gradual edge in workshop 46 and say nothing apologetic about it, a change from how I talked about them earlier in this room.

Where abrasive earns its place is the inner bevel. A strip of 3,000 grit abrasive on a piece of wood will strop the inside of a gouge, and 1,000 or 2,000 will do at a push. You do not need a bought stropping wheel for that. I keep about half a thousand tools in drawers on both sides of the bench and this panel has no clamping system at all, just bench cookies, because the board is heavy enough to hold itself.

Can a beginner practise this on something small?

A single leaf will do, and that is where I would start. Carve one lobe on a scrap, take a millimetre of air out under its rim, then stand the piece up and turn one lamp off. You will see in a second what the wall does and what its absence does. Nothing about that exercise needs a ten foot board, and nothing about it needs me standing over you either, though the bench classes exist for the people who want that.

Nobody would have known if I had skipped any of this. Other carvers would.

Something smaller will teach the same lesson faster. A rosette, an acanthus over a molding, or the Greek acanthus leaf all have edges worth hollowing, and they fit in one hand. The lessons map shows how they connect, the tools course covers the bent shanks, and the questions I get asked most sit alongside. You can also watch this board being finished workshop by workshop.

Nobody is in my shop while I work. The only people hearing me are on the other side of a camera, a strange way to spend a day and I have got used to it. Workshop 49 was the first time I ever streamed it live, and I could not read the chat properly because the computer sits too far from the bench. Pick something to carve. Shall we carve?