Carving Greek Acroterion

Ever seen a stone palm leaf standing up on the roof line of an old building? Wondered how a carver pulls that shape out of a flat board? Start at the bottom, with the base. Not the leaf.

What is a Greek acroterion?

A Greek acroterion is an ornament that stands on the roof line of a building, and the oldest version of the one I carve here is a stylised palm tree sitting on a flat base. The palm part is the palmetto. Underneath it sits the akroter, and you and I would just call that a plinth.

Carved stone in this style goes back to about 450 or 500 BC, which makes it one of the oldest designs on the planet. The meaning of it is victory. Why a palm tree stood for victory I tried to research, and I have no idea. Absolutely no idea. Whatever spiritual reason they had for it did not travel down to us with the shape.

Mine was never going on a roof. An architect asked me for a prototype. He was going to take my carving, pull a form off it, cast it in metal, and set a whole row of them on one building. What you see me carving is the mother of everything that came after it.

What wood do you use for architectural carving?

Lime wood, which is the same tree as American basswood, and it is soft enough that I am not afraid to put a knife into it. Two names, one tree, depending on which side of the ocean you learned the trade.

Soft matters more here than it does on a deep panel, because most of this piece gets shaped by a knife pushed with a bare hand. No mallet on the palm fan at all. Every fibre the wood gives up, it gives up to your thumb, so a board that fights back turns a pleasant afternoon into a wrestling match.

How should you transfer a pattern onto wood before carving?

Draw it by hand, print it to size, glue the paper flat to the board, leave it overnight, then saw around the outline. I could take a design like this into AutoCAD. Or SketchUp. Or Illustrator. I draw it by hand anyway.

Two reasons for that. Drawing keeps my hands trained, and it leaves the shape feeling like a human being made it. The line I pull with a pencil is never quite the line a program hands me, and that small wobble is the whole point of doing this by hand in the first place.

Once the glue is dry, treat that paper as gospel. Every pencil line on it is a promise about depth, and for the next five workshops it is the only instruction sheet you get.

Should you thin the glue for a paper carving pattern?

Use it straight out of the bottle, never watered down. Plenty of carvers add water first and I understand why, because thin glue spreads easier and lays flatter.

Water carries the glue down into the fibres. If a clear coat is all you plan to put on, nothing shows and no harm done. Put a stain on that wood and you get blotches, pale patches where the glue soaked in, and sanding will not save you from them.

Straight glue sits on the surface and stays there. Titebond original or Titebond 2, never Titebond 3, which takes far too long to dry for this. One warning so you do not panic. Your blade will squeak going through that dried glue line, and it sounds exactly like something breaking. Nothing is breaking.

What is a marking gauge for in wood carving?

A marking gauge scores a line into the wood that no chisel can wander off, and I mark every line on this piece before the first cut. Ordinary gauge. Nothing clever about the one on my bench.

One trick makes it far better. Set a knife tip into the board first and cut a small notch at the far edge, then let the gauge point drop into that notch and pull. The notch catches the point, so the line comes out dead straight instead of drifting off with the grain.

My first line on this base sits 9/16 of an inch down, 14 mm. Small steps either side of it go near 1/16 inch, roughly 1.5 mm. Tiny numbers, and they decide whether the finished base reads as machine made or hand made.

Is it cheating to use a hand plane on a carving?

A hand plane is a hand tool, and they were using them in ancient times. Roman planes have been dug up. People claim the Egyptians had them too. The Roman one looked nothing like what sits on my bench, and it still planed wood.

So a shoulder plane goes on the flat of the base and a block plane knocks a high ridge off. Somebody always calls that cheating, and they are wrong.

Where I do draw a line is not where most people expect it. A router bit exists that would make this entire moulding in one pass, and using it would be faking the job. Planes still need your two hands to read the wood and stop where the pencil says stop. A spinning bit reads nothing.

Is an ogee moulding Greek or Roman?

Greek. The Greeks were using that S curve before the Romans were using anything. Half the world calls it a Roman ogee because the router bit is sold under that name, and the shape is older than Rome.

The ogee runs on three sides of this plinth, and all three have to match. I shape it with a back bent gouge, a number 25 at 10 mm, three eighths of an inch, and I sharpen that tool inside and out before I begin. A back bent with a tired edge chatters, and chatter in a moulding shows forever.

Watch your shaving while you work. Its width, and whether it curls the same on every pass, tells you more about how true your moulding runs than your eye ever will.

How deep should the cuts be on an acroterion?

Shallow, and that surprises nearly everybody. Nothing on this piece goes deeper than 1/8 of an inch, 3 mm, and most of it sits at 1/16, about 1.5 millimetres.

Before I began I went and looked at the original designs, and the old ones are not deep either. The carver was after an outline, a drawing made of shadow, not a sculpture standing off a wall. Holding yourself back is the whole discipline of this job.

Write the ladder on your shop wall. V tool channels go 3/16 of an inch, 5 mm. Backgrounds drop 1/8, 3 mm. The channel around each spiral is 1/16, near 1.5 mm, and it has to stay that same 1/16 the whole way round or your eye will catch the wobble. When you are unsure about a depth, stop at 1/16. You can always go deeper tomorrow. Going back up is not an option, not ever.

What does bosting mean in wood carving?

Bosting is the roughing stage, where you get the whole form standing and no detail at all. Some carvers say boasting, some just say roughing. Same stage, three names.

On the palm fan I do this with a number 5 gouge at about a quarter inch, 6 mm, in sweeping rotating passes, and one eye stays on the pencil line the whole time. Reach the line. Never go past it.

Woodcarving is an art of deduction, and you only ever subtract. Some mistakes are fixable and some are not, and once the wood is off the board the wood is gone, so shape comes first and detail comes last. Every carver learns that order the expensive way at least once.

Which gouge should you pick for a curved line?

The one whose curve fits that stretch of the line, and finding it means trying them all. On the two spirals I work down through my number 7s, biggest first, standing each one on the drawn line to see where it sits perfectly.

The widest 7 owns the outer sweep. Then a smaller 7, then smaller again, and eventually one so small it is frightening to use, each owning its own piece of the spiral. A light tap with a mallet and no more, because that line only gets stamped once.

Gouge lines beat pencil lines every time. Pencil is my hand guessing at a curve. The gouge is a curve, ground into steel, and once it is stamped into the wood I can drop a knife point into it and follow something that cannot wobble.

Can you carve architectural ornament with just one knife?

Knives will carry most of an architectural job, and I have paid bills proving it. Nearly the whole acroterion is shaped with one cheap carving knife, a number 12 by Pfeil, taking heavy chips.

Back in 1998 I designed a coffered ceiling for a client, then designed the carving on it to be a one knife job. Every side of it. The whole ceiling, one month, one knife, and I made money that month. Fireplace mantel onlays came after. Panelled columns. Small jewellery boxes.

The old northern carvers worked this way, in Norway and Sweden and Denmark and Finland and Russia, and there is carved wood dated between the 8th and the 12th century done with nothing but a blade. Some people call it Viking work. That name does not sit right with me, because not every northern man was a Viking, and the British were doing the same thing.

My own lesson in what one knife is worth came somewhere I would not recommend to anybody. I carved mirror frames in a prison in Russia. Nobody there was going to hand me a roll of gouges. A knife I could keep, smaller than the one in my hand now, because they would not allow a blade any longer than that.

How do you hold a carving knife?

Rest the blade on your middle finger, squeeze the handle with two fingers, and block those two with a third. Not the pencil grip. The pencil grip looks sensible and it will hurt your finger.

Hold a knife the way you hold a pen and the handle bows against the side of your finger. Worse than sore, you cannot lean on it, so you end up forcing the blade with your wrist instead of driving it with your hand.

Set your fingers my way and the same control gives you far more pressure. Enough pressure that you can work hardwood with a knife, which most people will tell you cannot be done.

Where should your hand be when you hold a gouge?

Flat on the work, as close to the edge as you can get it, with the gouge lying as low as it will go. Beginners lift the handle and start digging, and once a tool is up at an angle nobody alive can control it.

Look at the bevel on my gouges. Long and low. Not every tool arrives that way, and mine are ground like that for a reason. A long bevel lets the tool ride almost flat, so the wood itself holds your line for you instead of your arm having to do it.

Then plant the other hand right on the piece, fingers spread, near enough to the edge that a slip stops short instead of running across the petal you spent all morning on.

Should you carve with the grain or against it?

Read the grain first, and be ready to turn the piece around rather than force a cut through it. On this palm fan the grain runs the length of the petals and then changes direction partway up, and where it changes is exactly where people snap a petal off.

I carve against the grain constantly and you will watch me do it. One condition makes it safe. When the edge is sharp enough that a full clean curl comes off the wrong way, you are slicing rather than tearing. The moment the wood starts chipping instead of curling, the wood is answering you, and the answer is stop.

Then rotate. Come at the same hollow from the other side, and rotate again if you need to. Nobody is timing you.

Why does a rough seam show up where two cuts meet?

Two cuts coming from opposite directions meet the fibres head on, and the ragged seam they leave in the middle is what I call a marriage line. The grain did not change there. Your direction did.

You never attack a marriage line. Come at it from several different angles with light passes, softening from both sides, until the seam melts into the curve and you cannot find where the two runs met. All marriages are like that.

Where does the shadow in a carving come from?

Out of the hollows. A concave cut beside a ridge is what throws the dark line, and with no hollow there is nothing but pale wood. This design has almost no depth to work with, so the shadow does nearly all the drawing.

Once I understood that, I stopped being nervous about a whisker of extra depth. When a concave wants to be a little stronger so the shadow reads, let it be stronger. That shadow line is what the design lives on.

Turn the shop lights off and look at your piece from the side. Weak darks mean weak carving, and no amount of tidying will fix it afterwards. If that one sentence just changed how you look at your own work, come and stand at my bench for the rest of it.

When should you sharpen a carving gouge?

Run a finger along the edge and feel for a burr, then watch the surface the tool leaves behind. When a gouge starts putting little marks in a cut that used to come out clean, there is a micro burr on that edge. Nothing else explains it.

Sharp is not a preference on this piece. You are working into grain that changes direction partway up the fan, and only a genuinely sharp edge gives you a clean wall on both sides of a hollow.

My fix takes seconds. A buffing wheel on the Worksharp, a couple of passes, straight back to work. Leather strops do the same job by hand and I still keep one, they just ask for more of your time.

Do wood carvers use sandpaper?

On a clean gouge cut, no, and you can see why in the hollows here. Where the tool sliced properly that surface is finished, and paper would only dull what the steel already did.

Two places I do reach for it. End grain on the base, where no gouge leaves a face I like. And lifting the last of the paper pattern and its dried glue off at the end, with 100 grit, rubbing gently so the paper comes away and the carving does not.

My piece had one more honest reason. A mould does not care whether a surface came off steel or off paper, so on a casting prototype sanding costs nothing. If yours is going to sit where somebody can pick it up and turn it over, think harder about it.

Do you measure a carving or just eyeball it?

Mostly you eyeball it, and then you check yourself afterwards. Семь раз отмерь, один раз отрежь. Measure seven times, cut once. Good advice, and on a piece like this I still hardly ever reach for a rule.

Set the middle finger of one hand against the edge of the wood, run it along with a pencil pinched in the same hand, and out comes a line parallel to that edge without measuring anything. Halfway marks come the same way. If a finger and a pencil bother you, measure instead, nobody is watching.

Eyeballing trains your eyes, and there is one more thing hiding in it. A line that is not perfectly parallel is proof a human being did the work by hand. If you want every line identical, that is what a machine is for.

How long does architectural carving take?

As long as it took a thousand years ago. Carving is one of the oldest trades on earth, and about the only one that never sped up.

Every other part of woodworking got machines. Routers first, then CNC, and a five axis machine will carve a great deal of detail. Not all of it. Nobody has yet built a machine that can carve in the Grinling Gibbons style, and I doubt anybody will, because the most advanced tool for that job is a human hand.

The hours in this acroterion are the hours a Greek carver spent, and a carver 300 years ago, and 500, and a thousand. Same knives, same chisels, same gouges, same planes. The only real difference between him and me is which of us was better at it.

Scripture even has a carver in it who worked stone and wood and metal, and it calls him a wise man, filled with the spirit of knowledge and understanding. He carved the Ark of the Covenant with the same knives and chisels I have. We live in a society of quick and cheap. Quick, and cheap. I do not think that is right.

Can a beginner carve a Greek acroterion?

Beginners can carve this one, and it is among the few architectural pieces I would hand over. None of it is deep. One knife does the bulk of it. For the base you need a marking gauge and two planes, not sculpture.

What it asks of you is patience and a sharp edge. If you have never held a gouge, First Cuts for Beginners is where your hands go first. Sharpening comes next, because every paragraph above depends on it, and Carving Tool Sharpening is the whole of that subject. To learn which tool does what before you spend money, All About Tools for Wood Carving will save you a drawer full of regret.

After this one, a door opens. The same slicing cut and the same hollows run through every leaf in the school, so the Greek acanthus and the Roman one both come easier once you have carved a palmetto. My lessons map lays the whole road out in order, and the old carving books in the library cost nothing to read tonight.

People want to know who is teaching before they ask what it costs, which is fair enough, so here I am.

So the drawing is glued down, the saw has been through it, and there is a board on your bench with a palm tree drawn on it. Where does the first line go? Come and find out at the bench, and by the fifth workshop you will be reading the grain before I say a word about it. Shall we carve?

Five workshops make up Carving Greek Acroterion, filmed at the bench, the first gauge line all the way through to the sandpaper, and the piece at the end of it went to an architect as the prototype for a metal casting.