Carving Furniture Panel – Design – Part 1

Wood carving panel design is the drawing stage, done in pencil on paper glued to the board, before the wood gets carved. On this furniture panel it runs fourteen lessons, and the carving waits until the drawing is done. The same board gets carved in the courses that follow, so what you draw here is what you carve later.

How does wood carving panel design start on a blank board?

Paper comes first, glued right onto the board. For lesson one I cut the sheet oversized, about an inch past the edge on every side. Any paper will work, even normal printer paper in a few pieces. Photo mount glue gets sprayed on the wood and on the paper both. Glue them, trim around, and now I've got a perfectly white surface to draw on and design on.

Under that paper is walnut, and not plain black walnut or European walnut. This one is more like a purple. Some of you are probably surprised you never saw purple walnut, but there is such a thing. A whole house I worked on was made of it, with doors about 2 7/8 inches thick (73 mm), almost three, plus every baseboard, every casing and the furniture. What was left over had splits. I resawed it and glued the two boards like a book match, so one cathedral repeats itself on the other side and the two face each other. Balanced.

The panel is 27 1/4 by 15 1/2 inches (692 by 394 mm) and only about 3/8 of an inch thick, 10 mm. It stands vertical, like a panel for a door. My plan was to go no deeper than 3/16 of an inch, 5 mm, so really low relief, but still with the effect of 3D.

Don't panic if your board is a different size. I provide the layout and the pattern, and on a smaller board you follow the same steps, principles, rules and laws of design, and believe me, you'll get really good results.

Which pencils, charcoal and chalk go on the paper?

Any pencil will do, plus an eraser. It's wise to have a few different ones, and I draw and redraw until I'm satisfied with the final design. My 8B is really soft, but 2B, 4B, 6B and even the hard ones work out. For the main flowers I switch between a 2H, a little harder, and a softer 4B that brings out the small filler flowers.

Charcoal is another story. Almost impossible to erase, so I don't use it right away. When it comes out in lesson thirteen, it makes the shadows a lot easier to see, and I try not to overdo it. A couple of spots of white chalk mark where my higher points will be. Just a little bit.

One more thing. I'm not trying to create a beautiful piece of drawing, though I could if I wished to. I'm drawing just for carving.

What do you decide before the golden ratio?

Decide where the eye starts and which end is the top. A Western eye starts at the left corner and moves downhill, left to right, the way you read a book. Someone Middle Eastern, Israeli or Arabic for example, probably starts on the right side.

My top is the left end. Not really critical. If a board has a single cathedral, the cathedral always goes up, so it shows you the top, but mine has two cathedrals facing each other, so I just decided.

Being Russian, I come from a country with an Asian part and a European part, and I wanted a design pleasing for both worlds. I'm not sure if anybody tried that before. Most of my students read left to right, so the main movement starts at the upper left corner, and later ones let your brain read it both directions.

Lesson five proves it with a small car on a line running from the upper left downhill. With a Western mindset you probably see it going downhill. Put the line from the right top instead, and the car climbs for a Western eye while an Eastern eye reads it going downhill.

Then the hero. Like in every movie, there's a hero, the main character, and opposite of him an antagonist or anti-hero. The main cluster and main idea develop in two focal points, and I want my hero on the top. Down at the bottom, in lesson eleven, the second focal point turns into the anti-hero, or the second hero of the story, and I'd like to get attention there, maybe, to the negative space.

What is the golden ratio doing on a furniture panel?

Finding the golden center is the first rule I follow. The simple way is the rule of thirds: photographers, cinematographers and filmmakers divide a board in three equal sections each way, and the four crossings become focal points. I could do that. My goal, though, is a beautiful piece of art, and I believe the best pieces in art throughout history followed the golden ratio rule.

People named that rule differently. I mention Leonardo da Vinci as one who tried to define it, and on camera in lesson two I say even Bach used that principle in music.

The number itself shows up in lesson fourteen. "To be exact, it's 0.618. All right? So 0.62 if you wish. But every detail matters." Split a line that is 100 percent, and roughly 62 sits on one side, 38 on the other. To simplify, you can always say the 60/40 rule, and six parts out of 10 is the easy way to remember it.

Usually I just eyeball it. Lesson twelve has a good example: I eyeball a point, check it with my golden ratio tool, and it gets to that point exactly. The tool divides 10 in six parts by itself, and I can always check with it like a caliper. Really handy.

Method for it	What you actually draw on the board	My verdict	The reason I give for that
Rule of thirds	Three equal parts each way, four crossings	Passed over	Photographers use it, I wanted art
Six of ten	Divide any line in ten, take six	My choice	The easy way to remember it
True golden section	Square corner against diagonal, then ninety degrees	Explained only	I don't like how it looks
Golden ratio tool	Four armed divider splitting ten into six	For checking	Landed right on my eyeballed point

Why draw diagonals and squares you will never carve?

Those lines find the centers, even on a board out of proportion. Proportionally, my board is not perfect like a golden ratio, and it's not going to stop me. You can find the golden ratio in any proportions.

With the ruler in lesson three, I draw a long line corner to corner and another between the other corners. Back in lesson one I measured the width, fifteen and a half exactly, to get the true square. A line connecting that square's point and the corner crosses right where I wrote "hero", my major center, and I mark it with a plus. The same move on the other side gives the antagonist point, a minus. Repeat it on the inner square, 11 1/4 inches (286 mm), and I've got major, major, minor, minor.

Rectangles get their turn in lesson seven. The true golden ratio rectangle is one to 1.62, roughly, but there are also root two, root three, root four and root five rectangles. Mine is close to root four, close to two squares. You could find the true golden section with the square and the diagonal. I don't like how it looks that way, so I did just six parts out of 10.

Two diagonals get names there too. On a vertical panel, the line pointing to the right upper corner is the baroque diagonal and the other one is the sinister diagonal. The baroque here doesn't mean the style, as I say on camera. I translate it as strange, and sinister as left.

I know all of those lines are kind of confusing, but they will make sense later on, believe me. To repeat a measure in lesson five I don't even use a ruler, just a piece of paper marked and carried to the other side. Most of those lines are going to be gone. You won't see them, but you're still going to feel that line.

To watch every one of those lines go down, get Access and draw along with me.

What do Fibonacci numbers have to do with the borders?

They set the widths, and the count starts from the thickness of the board itself, 10 mm. First, in lesson two, comes 10 millimeters all around, 3/8 inch. That space goes inside of a frame or inside of the door, inside the rails and stiles if you put a frame around it. It's my boundary, which I should not cross at all, and since the board is 10 millimeters, 10 is a good number.

The Fibonacci sequence runs one plus one is two, two plus one is three, three plus two is five. If 10 millimeters is my one, then 10 plus 10 is 20, which is 3/4 of an inch, the space I leave before the main border. I think it's just more appealing to the eye. How it works, I don't know. But I think the whole universe is actually created like this.

Inside of that runs another border, 3/16 inch, half of the 10 millimeters, so 5 mm. That band will stick up, with the wood taken down on both sides, like an applied molding right on the top.

About 5/8 inch in from that molding I mark all around, and the reason has to do with the frame. Even inside one, the lip is going to cover about 10 millimeters, but your eye is still catching the edge of the original design, somewhere inside of your brain. Count on, 20 plus 30, and you come to about 50 millimeters from the edge. That's a preliminary line, because some design still goes on it.

Then comes rhythm. In music something repeats itself, pam-pam-pam, and on the board a five millimeter band gets about five millimeters repeated. That's the rule of repetition. Lesson three brings the 5/8 back, marked again somewhere else, and lesson four even adds a border inside of the border, about an eighth of an inch, 3 mm, just because it's a furniture style carving. Extra detail, but it adds beauty to the design.

How do acanthus, volutes and flowers grow out of the lines?

Main movements come first, and the details after. That's my usual process, with a lot of erasing and redrawing until I get what I feel it's supposed to look like. Everything has to interweave, organically connected. Early on it is not, and I say so.

For an acanthus I first draw what I call a boat, the outside boundary of the movement, and subdivide inside it. Volutes get a play on size: one curl carried all the way to the center, then a much smaller one that's still a volute. It should not go pum, pum, pum, pum. It should have some music in it.

A rule that is really important in the design comes in lesson six. When a line hits another line straight on, that's a T-stop, and it breaks the rule of the flow. I make a tie instead, a curved line. Lesson eight adds the invisible kind: if my leaf would go all the way and hit a point, it would still be considered a T-stop. Connecting those lines is not required. The edge of the leaf just continues the movement.

Sometimes a good movement sits in the wrong place. Stepping back in lesson nine, I see an area too crowded, and it pulls my eye away. I keep the main outline, and the acanthus stays double, but one leaf is now hidden underneath the other. Lesson ten is full of quick verdicts. Something is too much in one place, and in another, too small and hard to carve.

Flowers wait until lesson twelve, at the main focal point. Three of them sit close together, and I don't want to repeat the same size: the biggest, a little smaller, then even more smaller. Only their main movements go down. Because this carving is shallow, the final movements I'll determine while I'm working on them, with my chisel in it.

Too much empty space gets filler flowers, really small, tiny flowers with small leaves. And every flower has an outside ring. The bottom ring, the lower layer, goes downhill most of the time, even if the rest of the flower goes uphill.

Why count the flowers and the leaves?

To land the count on a Fibonacci number. At the bottom of the panel in lesson fourteen I count leaves around three flowers. One, two, three, four, not good. Five, and it's not enough. Following Fibonacci numbers, it's got to be five or eight, so I go to eight. Once we carve it, I'll count how many petals I have too.

Later, in the antagonist area, three filler flowers become five, and the leaves go six, seven, eight, still not enough, so 13. "If you are afraid of number 13, so that's the place. Don't believe in that." It's just a number.

What does a virtual apprenticeship on one panel look like?

I'm working, you're watching, and you pick up what you like, then develop your own style. Be patient with me, I ask in lesson ten. I wanted to show the process, how I think, and I promised not to cut my corners. It's not a school, more a virtual apprenticeship.

Once in a while I step away, look from a little distance and stare for a few minutes. If it feels fine, continue to work. There's also a time gap between lesson eleven and lesson twelve, because I moved to another location, set up a new shop and was working on another project.

At the end of lesson fourteen I look at it all together. One element in the upper panel just doesn't look right to me, so it goes, and the opposite side changes too, so it's not too symmetrical. Then I say, "I believe I am ready to carve it." If I want to change something, I'll change it on the way. The drawing goes up for download, so you can print the full size, glue it on, and carve it.

The next lesson starts with the carving knife. If you want to draw this one with me from the first line, start here.

Shall we carve?