Carving Hashemi Flowers

Carving flowers in wood is layered work. I drew this panel at 12 by 24 inches, about 305 by 610 mm, on a board only 7/8 inch thick, roughly 22 mm. Then I sawed around the drawing, saved every offcut, and glued those same pieces back on to build the height where the flowers needed it.

Have you ever looked at a thin board and decided the flower you wanted was impossible on it? Ever priced a four inch slab? And do you sweep the offcuts off the scroll saw table into the bin, because they look like waste?

Those offcuts are the material you are missing. This panel started as a commission. A customer saw a larger piece of mine, liked the idea, wanted a smaller version, and we settled on 12 by 24 inches. I could have started with a four inch board and dug the whole flower out of solid wood. That gives you a mountain of chips on the floor, corners no gouge will ever reach, and a much bigger bill for wood. This kind of design looks complicated and it scares people off. It should not.

What decides whether a carved flower reads from across the room

• Height comes from layers you glue on, not from a thicker board.
• Every offcut from the scroll saw goes back onto the panel as a second or third level.
• Four small gouges carve almost any flower.
• A petal wants a wave in it and a hollow deep enough to hold shadow.
• Shadow does the work. A half millimeter line you cannot even pick out still throws one, and the shadow is what the eye reads.
• The tool marks stay on. I do not reach for sandpaper.

Why glue the offcuts back on instead of carving one thick block?

Gluing those scraps back down saves wood, and it saves you the corners a gouge can never reach. Look at what happens on the scroll saw. I draw the whole design on paper, spray it down with photo mount, saw around every line, and I keep all the pieces. After that I peel the paper off an offcut, lay it back down where the drawing calls for a higher level, match the grain direction, get the color as close as I can, and glue.

No clamps. When you spread the glue and rub the piece against the board, it pulls a kind of vacuum and clamps itself. You can slide it right onto the line and let it grab. I glued this one about half an hour before I started carving, which is faster than I would ever tell you to work. Give it 24 hours if you can.

Here is the part people do not believe until they see it. Once you start carving into that glued layer, the seam disappears. The grain runs through it, the color matches, and there is no glue line left to find. My second layer went on top of the first, and a third went on at the two spots I wanted as the highest points in the panel. Same wood, so nothing gives it away. That is how a 7/8 inch board grows into a flower standing proud of its own background, and it is the same idea behind a grape onlay or a Venetian flowers rosette.

Wood is not stone. It moves with the seasons across the grain, which is why the grain direction between two layers deserves as much care as the color. If you want to know why a panel splits on a curve, the US Forest Service publishes real research on wood properties, and there is a plain explanation of wood grain if you are starting from zero.

Which gouges does a flower actually need?

You need four gouges for a flower, not four hundred. I own shelves of tools and I still reach for the same handful on every petal in this panel, so this is the short list.

My tools are mostly Ashley Iles out of England. Machined tools, beautifully done, and the steel holds an edge the way I want it to. Henry Taylor deserves a mention in the same breath. Pfeil in Switzerland makes shapes nobody else offers, and my favorite V tool for flowers is their number 16, which has a really sharp angle to it. One warning about Ashley Iles. They mark their back bent tools differently, so a back bent number 7 comes stamped 37, which is worth knowing before you go hunting for a tool you already own.

The number on a gouge is its sweep, the curve across the edge, and that matters far more than the brand on the handle. The whole vocabulary sits in All About Tools for Wood Carving, before you spend a dollar on steel. And none of it works dull. With dull tools you will not carve what I carve here, and that is not a sales line, it is just how wood fibers behave. Sharpening is a craft of its own and it takes years, which is why it has a course to itself.

Four tools is enough, and I learned that somewhere other than a catalog. At 18 I was arrested for my faith and spent a long stretch in a Soviet prison. I carved furniture in there with a knife I made, 10 mm wide, and a tiny gouge I ground out of a nail. A mafia boss sold the pieces to the prison administration and paid me one boiled potato a day. One potato. So when somebody tells me they cannot begin carving until the tool order arrives, I have a hard time hearing it.

How do you hold a panel this big while you carve it?

Screw a rotating vise to the back of it. I left one solid, uncarved patch on the backside of this panel on purpose, right about in the middle, and I put a Veritas corner vise on it with one inch screws. The board keeps its full thickness in that patch, so the screws have plenty to bite into.

Now I can spin the whole panel and come at a petal from any angle I like. You still feel a little shake. Never bothered me. You can clamp the panel flat to the bench instead, or glue it to a scrap board with a sheet of paper in between so it splits off cleanly later. I use the vise on almost every project, and when the panel is finished that same solid patch takes the hanging hardware.

What goes underneath the flowers?

Leaves go underneath, and most of them will never be seen. On my drawing those round shapes look like the flowers themselves. They are not. Those circles are the background the flowers sit on, and the flowers get raised above them on the next layer. Below each one I develop some leafage anyway.

Most of that leafage ends up covered, and I carve it regardless. A person standing to the side of the panel catches those leaf edges from an angle, and that glimpse is the difference between a flower sitting on a board and a flower growing out of one. I still leave flat spots in among the leaves, small landing pads for the next layer to be glued onto. It is fussy work, and it is what makes a panel honest from every side, which is the same thinking behind acanthus over moldings and behind every relief the old masters left us.

I outline that leafage with the V tool and a mallet. Twelve ounces, and I barely hit it. People think a mallet is for force. It is for control. A tap gives you a measured amount of travel that hand pressure cannot match, and on a curve where the grain runs out from under the edge, that control is the whole game.

How deep should a petal go?

Go as deep as you can still clean. That is the honest limit. My rule on every petal in this panel is as wavy as possible, as deep as possible, and as clean as possible, and those pull against each other. The deeper you drop a hollow, the harder it gets to reach in and clean the walls, and a dirty hollow looks worse than a shallow one ever will.

Here is the sequence on a single petal. I find where the flower center sits, usually a little off to one side, and I point every movement toward it. Then I take the five millimeter gouge and hollow the petal, concave, running from about halfway along toward that center. I flip the same tool upside down and the same edge gives me the convex side. Sometimes I take away the petal underneath first, just to build myself a wall to carve against, so the wave can go deeper than it otherwise could.

Then the undercut. I get under the edge right away rather than saving it for the end, with the number 11 at one millimeter, and I follow that with the half millimeter for the deepest line. You will not even spot that half millimeter line. The shadow it throws is what reaches you, and wood carving is all about the shadow. Every wave, every hollow, every undercut is there to catch light on one side and hide it on the other.

Real flowers are wavy. Not all of them, and some sit much flatter than others, but the wave is what your eye expects to find. So I chase it hard, petal after petal, over and over. Fifty lessons of over and over. Nobody carves it exactly the way I do, and I say so in the videos too. You watch to get the idea, and then your own hand does something else with it, which is how it went in my apprenticeship at 16.

Why leave the tool marks instead of sanding them out?

Tool marks throw shadow and sandpaper flattens it. I leave every layer of this panel a little rough while I am building the form, because my job at that stage is the overall shape and the arrangement, and I know more wood is going to be glued on top of it. Once the whole thing is assembled I go back and clean the places where the eye actually lands.

Even then I do not go extreme, and I do not reach for sandpaper. I like the facets. Each little gouge facet has an edge, every edge casts the tiniest shadow, and enough of those tiny shadows is what makes carved wood look alive instead of molded. Sanding rounds all of it into mush. Sand yours if you like, it is your panel. Mine stays off the paper, which is the older and more honest way to finish a carving.

Frederick Oughton, writing about the English tradition that produced Grinling Gibbons, points out where the first master carvers came from.

From the ranks of the stone masons came the master carvers.

They were called imaginators. John of St Albans held the title of King's Imageur in 1268, four centuries before Gibbons carved his limewood swags, and I love that word. An imaginator has to see the thing before the wood does. The drawing comes first for that reason, in this course and in Principles of Design in Wood Carving. My own master taught me at 16 that design is not drawing on paper. He meant the laws of space and repetition, and learning to think like a tool.

Whose name is on the ribbon?

Hashemi is a name, carved into one of the two ribbons that run through this design. The panel was made on commission, and you can put your own name in the same place, or leave the band empty. A commissioned panel beats an exercise piece for that reason. Somebody's family will be reading those letters a hundred years from now.

The ribbons are their own problem. Getting a flat band to look like it is turning in space, catching light on one face and losing it on the other, is a 3D problem more than a carving problem. Skip them if you like. I would not.

Is a 50 lesson panel too much for a second project?

For a second project, honestly, it is too much. This course runs 50 lessons and 248 video parts, and it follows one commissioned panel from the first drawing to the last undercut, in real time, with the mistakes left in. If you have never held a gouge, start with First Cuts for Beginners, then carve a flower rosette or a chamomile and bow rosette. Those teach the same petal moves on one flat layer.

Come here when you have a few pieces behind you and flat work has started to bore you. What you take away is not one panel. You get a method for building height out of thin stock, and that method carries straight into architectural work, into furniture in the Chippendale style, into Baroque and Rococo ornament, into an acanthus scroll. The whole Venice Room is built on it.

Tuition here funds orphans and widows, and it sponsors children from poor families who cannot pay for art school, the way I could not when my father left us. Walk the whole lessons map before you decide anything, and if you would rather stand at a bench beside me, the in person workshops fill up fast. Access runs monthly or yearly and renews automatically every period until you stop it, and you stop it yourself from your own account. The two plans are on the Access page.

So do you want to keep carving flat, or do you want the flower to stand up off the board?

Shall we carve?