Carving Furniture Panel – Part 2 – carving stage

Same panel, second stage. The drawing already sits on the board from the design course, so here the wood starts coming off, background first, then the acanthus and the flowers above it. Shaping and shadow finish in the course after this one.

What depth does the ground sit at under a carved flower? Which side of a leaf goes over the top, and which one grows from underneath? Where does shadow come from when the carving stands a millimeter and a half above the background? Those three questions are most of the work on a furniture panel, and I answered them on this one in walnut.

What wood do you use for a carved furniture panel?

Walnut is what this panel is carved from, and walnut runs harder than basswood or limewood, which turns out to help me rather than fight me. The wood pushes back when I pull a knife along a line. On soft basswood that same pressure drops me three millimeters too deep, and then the whole background must come down to meet my mistake.

Look at the color of this board. Purple, in places. Normal walnut does not do that.

Cracks run through it too. I knew about them before I drew a single line on the surface, and I used the board anyway. People building furniture in the 19th century were nowhere near as picky. A little sap along one edge and today somebody throws the board on the fire. Back then they used it.

Where do you begin on a relief panel?

Start with a marking gauge on the straight molding lines, then carve every curved line straight down with a knife at 90 degrees, before you take out one chip of background. That gauge is tool number one here. Mine is not expensive. The screw sits proud of the blade where a better one hides it, and the line still comes out where I want it.

Rub your finger around the edge first. The gauge fence follows that edge, so one bump of dried glue sends your line wandering. I found glue on this board and shaved it off.

Then the knife, and any knife will do. Mine is a number 3, or my favorite Pfeil number 12, pulled toward myself with both hands on the tool. Straight down, square to the face. Never lean the bevel in under the line. Repairing a bad line costs far more time than carving a good one the first time.

Those knife lines are not there to remove wood. What they do is give a gouge somewhere to land when its turn comes.

How deep should the background of a relief carving be?

The background on this panel sits at three set depths, 1/16 of an inch near the moldings, 1/8 through the middle, and 3/16 where the main bouquet needs room, which is 1.5, 3 and 5 millimeters. A depth map in three colors stops the guessing. Light blue is the shallow ground, yellow the middle, red the deep.

An invisible line runs along the molding and I cannot cross it. Above that line my carving stands only 1.5 mm proud, so a leaf up there says everything inside that. Below it I can drop away and let the same leaf roll over on itself.

Take the ground down to about 1/8 of an inch and stop. Leave a hair, call it 1/32 of an inch, for the cleaning pass. And keep those molding lines high until the very last, because the router plane needs high ground to ride on.

Work across the grain whenever the bench position allows it. Along the grain the wood decides how far your chip runs, and it will split a detail clean off the panel for you.

Zone of ground	How deep it goes in both systems	Map color	What I use that depth for
Next to moldings	A sixteenth of an inch, 1.5 mm	Light blue	A leaf says everything within it
Through the middle	An eighth of an inch, three millimeters	Yellow there	Where a leaf can roll over
Under the bouquet	Three sixteenths of an inch, five millimeters	Bright red	The hero gets the deepest ground
The cleaning allowance	A thirty second for the last pass	Not mapped	Stop there and clean it later

Do you need a router plane for relief carving?

A router plane is not required, and a number 3 gouge or a grounding tool gives you the same flat floor, but the plane holds one true depth across a whole panel and nothing else does it as fast. Furniture makers had them in the 18th century, so the tool is period correct as well as useful. Veritas sells blades as narrow as a sixteenth and as wide as 19 millimeters, three quarters of an inch, and reaches corners a Lie-Nielsen cannot.

I will be honest with you. Some days I reach for that plane because it feels good, not because the panel needs it.

The other tool worth its money is a number 23, the macaroni. It carries a true 90 degree corner on each side, so it walks a molding line and leaves the wall dead upright without digging in underneath. Furniture makers owned one, most carvers never did, and I have four. Buy one if you plan to build furniture carved in an honest 18th century manner. Otherwise a 3 mm eleven, worked on one side of its edge, does the same job more slowly. Around the point where depths stop being guesswork, most people would rather watch the panel worked in order, and that is when they come and carve this panel with me.

What stops a carving gouge from slipping?

Planted hands stop a gouge from slipping. Both hands stay solidly on the board, the tool rides across the middle finger of one hand, and the two hands pinch it between them. My middle finger is the controlling finger on every fine cut I make.

Never carve with your hands in the air. Wave a gouge at the wood the way somebody airbrushes a car and you have no control. When one hand has to come up for reach, my pinky goes flat on the board and carries the weight. One finger is enough. Two if the reach is awkward.

The second half of control is how the edge travels. I never press a gouge straight down and shove it. The corner goes in at a slight angle and the tool moves sideways as it drops, so it slices rather than pushes. Step carving, I call it. Even with an almost flat number 3 I am slicing.

Wiggling helps as well. Some carvers say never do that, but I do it a lot and it gives me more control. Sharpen well enough and you barely press at all. A brass mallet, tapped lightly, steadies a cut better than hand pressure ever does.

How do you carve acanthus leaves on a furniture panel?

Every acanthus movement on this panel begins with an eye, a pipe runs out of that eye, and once those two sit right the rest of the leaf is only deciding which lobe passes over and which one grows from underneath. The style here is North European, French, late 18th century. I stay honest to my drawing.

Before a gouge goes near the line, I carve a relief line with a 3 millimeter number 11. A gouge is thick steel. Press it into walnut with nothing relieved and it shoves the fibers sideways. The line looks clean when you stand up, and next morning that side has gone rugged.

The volutes are where I made my mistake, and I would rather show it than hide it. I carved into the second one before deciding which way it should slope. Worse, it came out nearly the same size as the volute beside it, and a repeated ornament that repeats at the same size has no rhythm left. So I made it smaller, gave it its own slope, and the panel reads better than my drawing did. Nobody except you will ever know.

A volute can lean five ways, flat on top or tipped toward any of four sides. High on a panel, where a person looks straight at it, tipping the scroll toward the viewer buys depth you do not physically have.

How can a shallow relief carving look three dimensional?

Shallow relief reads as deep when every element wraps, which means the surface runs downhill, comes back up, and drops again instead of sitting on one flat plane. Red marker for the high spots, a second color for the low ones, before a single gouge goes in. Then protect the red.

Keep the movement organic. A sharp valley or a sudden dip announces where the tool stopped, and real leaves never break like that.

What we are doing on a panel this shallow is a trick played on the human eye. There are a few millimeters of depth here, and we are asking somebody at a cabinet to believe there is plenty.

Design carries the other half. A line that dies under an element has to come back out the far side going the same way, tangent to itself, or the movement stops looking like one plant. Brad asked me once why I ended a movement exactly where I did, and the honest answer was that I had none. I thought it looked better there.

What makes a carved flower petal look real?

Petals come alive when you run convex into concave and back again across the face of each one, keeping a single ridge as the high spot and letting every other surface fall away from it. Convex, concave, convex, concave. Then blend the ridges until no transition anywhere reads as sharp.

Do not make them perfect. Five identical petals look artificial the second the light touches them, and the eye knows before the brain catches up.

The main bouquet is the hero of the design, so it gets the deepest ground, five millimeters. I round its middle into most of a half sphere, then take a Dockyard number 8 at one sixteenth and excavate the hole inside, so the tangles look like they grow out from the center. Cheap tools. Very good at that one job.

Why do wood carvers undercut a relief carving?

Undercutting carves the shadow, and shadow is the only thing that lifts a leaf off the background when the carving itself is a millimeter and a half deep. Not every furniture maker undercuts a panel. I do it every time, and I love what it gives back.

A 1 millimeter number 11 goes over on its side and runs in under the edge, then a half millimeter one takes the deepest bite. While the tool is under there I roll it a little, so the underside comes out round instead of flat.

One warning about furniture. Never leave a razor edge on a ridge. A panel on a chest or a door gets touched every day, and a sharp ridge snaps off in somebody's hand. I take mine to crisp and stop.

Because I undercut, I never chop straight down to final depth in one go. Chop all the way and you stamp a tool mark into the background, then the undercutting opens it right up where everyone can see.

Do you sand a wood carving?

Sandpaper is not how I clean a background, a scraper is, because an abrasive leaves grit buried in the surface and a scraper leaves the wood itself. Push a router plane too hard and the blade chatters. Jump marks, I call them, and they sit in the background floor where no camera will show them.

I scrape them out with a number 9 Swiss chip carving knife. Thick steel, a chip carving tool doing work nobody sold it for, and it beats anything else on my bench. Do not overdo it, because a scraper still takes wood off.

I am not against sandpaper. But look at how furniture actually got finished. Most makers used scrapers, and some in the 17th and 18th century used Dutch reeds, a plant growing along a river, about the same bite as 400 grit. Wrapped around a paper tube, a length of reed lasts longer. Nothing abrasive stays behind in the grain.

Some carvers hit hard, ignore every tool mark and finish in half my time. People who love hand work go hunting for those marks, because a tool mark is proof a hand made the thing. Some of you are picky about a background, and I would rather you did not pick on me.

The board I clamped under this panel while I marked it was a scrap from a weekend class I taught at the Mark Adams School of Woodworking in May 2019, Viking style carving. Still on my bench. Walnut forgave me plenty here. If you want the real depths and the order the work happened in, mistakes and all, get Access to the whole panel course and carve it beside me. Shall we carve?