Carving Furniture Panel – Part 3

Same panel again, and this is the last of the three courses. The drawing happened in the first one and the shapes came up in the second. What is left is shadow, and the surface you actually touch.

What is a plug cut in wood carving?

A plug cut takes wood out to an exact depth by standing a deep gouge straight down and rotating it until a plug lifts free. My tool for it is a number 9 at 6 mm, a quarter inch, and in tight spots a 3 mm one, an eighth of an inch. Other carvers call this cut something else. I call it a plug because a plug is what comes out.

Tap the tool around with a mallet, gently. Force snaps a number 9.

What makes the cut worth learning is the floor it leaves. The bottom of a plug comes away flat, so you can read your depth off it and bring every neighboring area down to that same line, which on a panel carrying two dozen separate elements is the difference between a carving that hangs together and one that wanders.

None of that happens before the outline, though.

I go around every drawn line with a number 11 veiner at 2 mm, about a sixteenth of an inch, and the cut stays under half a millimeter deep. A 1 mm tool or a 3 mm tool would do the same job. Outlining first is the step people skip, and skipping it is how a leaf tears away at the stem while you are working next to it.

Why do carvers hold the gouge at 45 degrees?

A gouge presented at about 45 degrees to the line slices the fibers, and one presented square at 90 degrees crushes them. Square feels accurate. That is why almost everybody does it, and why so many walls come out ragged.

Turn the tool so the edge meets the line at a slant and it enters on one corner and travels across. Cleaner wall, less effort, much less chance of the piece splitting under you.

Slicing beats pushing everywhere on this panel, and it holds for the router plane as well. I never drive that thing straight ahead. One handle in my hand, the blade coming in at roughly 45 degrees, and the body pivots through the cut.

Keep the passes short too. Three or four millimeters at a time, and nothing stops you going back for another.

Grain settles the rest. Every gouge cut has a clean side and a rough side, and which is which depends on the grain rather than on your skill. When one wall of a hollow comes out torn, turn the panel and take it from the other direction.

How do you get the background of a relief carving flat?

Background comes down in three passes, and the last two are about holding one level rather than removing wood. Hog the waste out with any big gouge, a number 7 at 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, and take the cuts across the grain. Running along the grain is faster and it is also how a panel splits.

Next comes a grounding tool, a number 3 sweep with a slight curve seen from above, so the corners cannot dig in. Mine is the Ashley Isles number 47, a sixteenth of an inch wide.

Then the wall. Set a number 2 at 10 mm right on the line and pare down in steps, and keep the tool at 90 degrees to the surface the whole way, because a tool leaning inward there gives you an undercut you never asked for. On the long straight runs I lay a 90 mm chisel on the line and tap it once. Furniture makers love a perfect line.

Do not lean hard on a thin edge while you pare, either. I said that out loud on one of these videos and broke a piece about four minutes later.

One rule sits above all of it. I can always go deeper. I cannot go shallow.

So near a molding I stay about a millimeter off the line while outlining, since I have no idea what the grain will do under the edge. A split on the leaf side I can redraw and carve around. Lose a piece of the molding, though, and it is simply gone, with no inventing my way out of it, which is why molding work gets a course of its own.

Why does my carved leaf look flat?

A leaf reads flat when its surface is one plane, and the cure is a raised middle with a hollow running down each side of it. Cut a section through any petal in 18th century work and the profile is the same. Hollow, ridge, hollow. The outer edge lifts as well, so a petal sits like a shallow trough with a spine in it.

You never carve the ridge. Take one hollow down the left with a number 8 at 3 mm, take another down the right, and the ridge is whatever is left standing between them.

Go and look at old European work in any museum and you will find the same middle raised. I am not inventing a house rule.

Two habits flatten a leaf faster than anything else I see.

The first is spooning. A carver starts at the top edge, digs in, then escapes out again, leaving a dimple in the middle and a high rim all the way round. No bueno. My hollows run right through the petal and out the far side, and that single change is what puts the curl into it.

Second is a straight line. Nothing on this panel is straight, and when I lay a tool along an edge and see a flat run of it I go back and put a wave in.

Where the ridge sits matters as much as the ridge. My center line lands at about 60 to 40, six parts out of ten, the golden spot, and a leaf built that way looks older and calmer than one split down the middle. That habit comes out of Principles of Design in Wood Carving.

Wherever two lobes part there is an eye, and every eye gets a pipe. An eye wants the shape of a water drop, and the pipe is the raised piece running out of it, convex at any size, without exception. Some of them here are barely 1 mm across. If you want to come and carve this panel with me, that one rule will carry you through most of what follows.

Which tool holds one depth across a whole carving?

A router plane holds one exact depth across a whole area, and that is why it belongs on a carving bench as much as on a furniture bench. Set the blade once and every pass after it lands at the same level. On a panel where a dozen hollows have to agree, that matters more than speed.

Mine is a Veritas. Swapping a blade takes a couple of seconds, and the blades go down to 1 mm and up to 19 mm, three quarters of an inch. I keep a small plane and a micro one beside it for spots the big body will never reach. Nobody pays me to say any of that.

Check the depth even when you have not touched the setting. Pull a blade out, put the same blade back, and the depth has moved a hair. Tiny, but it moves.

Most 18th century furniture makers could carve, and this was one of the tools they leaned on hardest. For the rest of the rack explained properly, there is All about tools for Wood Carving.

How do you undercut a carving without breaking it?

Undercutting on furniture stops well short of what you would dare on a wall panel, because an edge carved too thin breaks the first time somebody moves the piece. A chair gets sat on. A cabinet door gets pulled. Anything I carve into furniture has to survive being handled by me, then by a finisher, then by whoever lives with it.

My tool here is a number 11 at half a millimeter. For furniture work I would put that little thing on the must have list ahead of almost everything else in the rack.

Flute up at twelve o'clock to start the cut, then roll it toward eleven, and toward ten as you work in under the edge. Three millimeters of undercut, an eighth of an inch, is plenty to make one petal sit convincingly on top of another. Shadow does the lifting, not depth.

Light falls from above, near enough always, so before I make a separation I work out which side the shadow has to land on. That settles which element overlaps which, and picking it backward drags your best shape underneath where nobody will ever see it.

How are small flowers carved on antique furniture?

Small filler flowers are carved as little domes with a dark hole punched in the middle, and the hole goes in first. Round the dome over before you make the center and the wood there has gone weak, so the tool breaks the dome you just finished.

Order carries this one. Punch the center with a small number 8, about 1.5 mm, a sixteenth of an inch, angled the way the flower will slope rather than straight down. Outline the dome next, a number 11 at 2 mm, keeping the dome 4 or 5 mm wide and only about 1 mm deep. Then turn the number 8 upside down and shave the dome round with it.

That outline is not decoration. With no relief cut around the outside, every fiber you push travels toward the center of the dome with nothing to break it, so instead of carving you crush wood until the dome tears out.

Other ways exist. Excavate one deep center, run every cut into it, and you get a strong dark spot with almost no detail. You can also ring the dome with tiny beads. I like the plain dome.

How thin can a carved tendril be?

A tendril on this panel finishes at a sixteenth of an inch, about 1.5 mm wide. On camera it looks like a fat ribbon. In the wood it is narrower than a matchstick, and somebody tells me every year that there is no way it is really that small.

Control at that size comes out of your other hand. I plant a finger on the work right beside the tool and let it work like a spring, so the edge moves in cuts I can actually stop. Sometimes I catch the finger. That happens to anybody who carves all day and stops being afraid of the steel.

Restraint is the other half of it. Put too many little grooves down a leaf edge and the whole thing goes stripy, and stripes read as a stack of lines instead of a plant. The surface has to change gradually. Glowing, never striped.

Which scraper smooths a relief carving best?

A scraper does the job, and on this panel a plain utility razor blade does most of it. Hold the blade at an angle to the direction you are travelling rather than square to it, because an angled blade reaches into small hollows that a flat one skates over. You can grind a hook on the edge like a card scraper, or use the corner as it comes.

Scraping is old. Carvers were smoothing work with broken glass in the 18th century, and glass was already about in the 15th, so none of this is a modern shortcut.

Steps get blended, never attacked. Where two levels meet I walk a number 3 spoon gouge down the high side until the transition disappears, then scrape across it.

Most of my final blending happens off camera under a magnifier lamp, and I say so in the lessons. I would rather leave a section looking half done on the video than pretend a camera can show you half a millimeter.

Not everything gets fixed either. There is a crack in this panel with glue sitting in it, and it does not look nice. One day I will scrape the glue out with a dental pick and let in a piece of walnut. It has been one day for a while now.

So a panel sits on your bench with the movement roughed in and nothing on it throwing a shadow yet. Where does the first hollow go? Get Access to all fourteen lessons and watch every one of them go in, including the flower I keep calling an acanthus flower, which I have never once seen growing in real life. Shall we carve?