Venetian Flowers Rosette

Nobody in 1500 owned a computer, and their ovals came out right anyway. Twine, three nails, a pencil. That is the whole machine.

Have you ever drawn an oval freehand and known, before you finished it, that the thing was lopsided? Have you then spent an hour trying to fix it with an eraser? Put the eraser down.

What you see here is one panel out of my Venice Room. Two flat spots inside that room needed an inlay, so I carved a pair of them, and I filmed this one because the flowers teach something that carries into every other job you will ever do.

What is a Venetian flowers rosette?

This piece is an oval panel with a raised bouquet carved inside a moulded rim. Mine holds four button flowers, two larger open blooms and long leaves, all sitting on a punched ground, in the style of late fifteenth century Venice.

Key takeaways

• String and three nails give you the oval. Egyptian builders worked exactly this way, and the method has not aged.
• Sketch every flower as an oval, never a circle. Sloping them into three dimensions is what makes them read round.
• Rough with a big tool. A 20 mm number 9, cutting across the grain, three eighths of an inch off your line.
• Drop the ground twelve millimetres below the flowers, then a quarter inch again at each boundary.
• No two petals repeat. Convex, concave, convex, and different again on the next flower.
• Settle the light source early. That one decision tells you which petal hides beneath which.
• Punch the ground and the flower middles. The same punch turns up on every piece in this room.

How do you draw a true oval without a computer?

String, three small nails and a pencil. Find your centre lines first, then set a nail at each end of the short axis and one where the string will pivot.

My own sketch came off an iPad, freehand, and the oval in it was not true. That bothered me enough to start again with rope.

Finding the centre needs nothing clever. Set a pair of calipers roughly half the distance, strike an arc from one side, strike another from the opposite side, and the middle sits between your two marks. Two marks, one line. Repeat at ninety degrees with a square, or with a sheet of printer paper if you have no square, since printer paper is square enough for this.

Nails go in about an eighth of an inch clear of where the moulding will land. Loop the twine, pull the third nail, take a pencil, and go round. Mine took three attempts. The first ran wide, the second too narrow, and I marked the keeper in red so I would not lose it among the rejects.

Perfect? No. Perfect enough, and perfect enough is what the old work was.

Why draw the flowers as ovals rather than circles?

Every flower on my drawing is an oval, and not one of them stays that way. Once you slope a flower downhill in all directions, the oval shortens as your eye travels over it, and what your eye receives is a circle.

Draw them round instead and they finish squashed. Carvers hit this constantly, blame their own hands, and go back to the bench convinced they cannot cut a curve. The drawing was already wrong.

That rule reaches past flowers, into any three dimensional ornament you lay out flat. Plan the shape you want to SEE, then work backwards to the shape you have to DRAW.

What stock, and what stops it moving?

Eight quarter stock, near enough an inch and seven eighths. Mine came from offcuts left over from the same room, and since the piece finishes under grey paint, the grain direction hardly mattered.

Holding is bronze bench dogs. Veritas, and they want 19 mm holes rather than the 20 mm ones on a Festool bench, so measure before you buy. I glued leather onto every face that touches wood, because bare brass marks an edge, and light pressure beats heavy pressure every time.

The rim is a Roman ogee, and I cut it with a router. Yes, that is cheating. This room had to be finished, and I had run out of the luxury of doing everything by hand.

Solid block, or flowers applied to a backing?

Both are legitimate, and I nearly went the other way. The quicker route is to scroll each flower out on its own, carve it in the hand, glue the lot down onto plywood or MDF, and run a separate oval moulding round the outside. An applied rosette.

It wastes less wood and saves a great deal of digging. I stood at the bench with that drawing for a long while and could not choose between them.

Solid won for one reason. On camera you can watch everything that happens between a flat board and a finished panel, and an applied piece hides most of it. One 8/4 board, and the whole bouquet was dug from the middle of that plank. If you want to see where this thing ends up, it goes into the Venice Room, and there are two of them, mirrored, one for either side of the same wall.

Which tools take the waste off?

Start bigger than feels comfortable. A 20 mm number 9 does more in ten minutes than a small tool does in an hour, and the small ones come out later.

Tool	What it does on this panel	Size	Why I reach for it
Number 9	Straight down cuts right round the whole drawn design	20 mm	Stay three to five millimetres outside your line
Number 9	The tighter curves the big sweep cannot follow	10 mm	Three eighths of an inch, near enough
Number 3	Levelling whatever mess the roughing gouge left behind	20 mm	Approximate is fine at this stage
Number 11	Separations, deep shadow and every undercut on the piece	2 to 6 mm	Almost every shadow here came off one of these
Spoon gouge	Hollows that a straight tool simply cannot reach	10 mm	A number 7 does the job nicely

Cut across the grain rather than along it wherever you can. Best practice, not a law, and on a panel this size it saves you tear out in the places that matter.

What is a number 17, and why is it not a V tool?

A number 17 looks like a V tool and is not one. The bottom of it carries about a sixteenth of an inch of roundness, so what it leaves has a curve at the base instead of a crease.

The wings still run out to the sides the way a V tool's do. All the value sits right there. One tool reaches left and right, so I stop swapping between a small veiner and something flatter every thirty seconds.

The ones on my bench are Swiss made, and three sizes did this panel, 20 mm and 6 mm and 3 mm. Only three sizes reach the United States as far as I know, so buy what you find. The tools course goes through the numbering properly.

Where it earns its keep is the undercut. It slides under a leaf edge and leaves the transition clean, with no hard line to chase out afterwards. I still reached for number 11s on most of this piece, because a veiner feels closer to the century I am copying.

What does it mean when the wood feels spongy?

Your tool is blunt. Carvers blame the timber for this constantly, and the timber is almost never at fault.

When the surface mushes under the edge instead of slicing, stop and go to the stone. Two minutes later the same wood cuts like cheese. I have watched people fight a board for an afternoon over an edge that needed four passes on a strop.

How far down does the background go?

Twelve millimetres sit between the flower tops and the ground, and six millimetres more where one bloom meets its neighbour. Those two numbers carry the whole depth of the piece.

Clear the bulk using something wide. I reached for a three inch gouge on the open areas, purely because I had no wish to spend a day on waste removal, then tidied with a number 7 and a number 5.

You will lose your pencil lines doing this. Everybody does. Keep the printout beside you and draw them again, and in the case of flowers nothing has to land back in exactly the same place.

Why should no two petals match?

Repetition is what makes carved work look cast. Convex, then concave, then convex again, and the next flower gets a different sequence entirely.

Some petals climb. Others fall. Near the middle every one of them drops away, because that is what a real bloom does, and the outer edges wander instead of running true. None of it is difficult, but every bit of it is deliberate.

What decides which petal hides under which?

The light. Settle where it falls first, and the answer picks itself.

An open V notch between two petals always reads as a mistake. One petal has to pass beneath the other. Which one? Whichever throws the shadow you want, given that my panel hangs near shoulder height with the light coming from above, and gets looked at in the evening with the lamps on. Work out where the dark falls, and every other decision on the panel follows from it without any argument.

What goes in the middle of the small flowers?

A dome, like a button, sunk in its own hollow. Grooves run inward around it, cut with a gouge barely a millimetre across.

Smaller than a sixteenth of an inch, that tool. On camera the grooves look enormous and in the hand they are nothing at all. They are also the difference between a lump and a flower.

Then the punch. Texture inside each middle, texture across the ground, and the ornament suddenly stands away from what it sits on. Every panel in this room got the same treatment.

A straight gouge cannot clean a hollow like that. Reach for a spoon, a number 7 around 10 mm, and it lifts the mess out in one pass.

Why are the leaves plainer than the flowers?

The flowers carry this panel and the leaves only hold them up. Every concave I leave out of a leaf is attention handed back to the cluster at the centre.

I could give those leaves as many folds and curls as the blooms have. It would take longer and it would spoil the panel. Two busy things fight each other, and I would rather the eye landed on the flowers and stayed there.

So each leaf gets a raised centre line, and two or three long grooves running with the twist. One curl at the tip where it wants one. Nothing else goes on them. From across a room they read as leaves holding a bouquet, which is the whole job I gave them. Leaves that ARE the subject are a different discipline, and the Greek acanthus is where that starts. More flowers, if flowers are your weakness, are in the Hashemi set.

Where do the border divisions go?

Halve the distance, then halve what is left. Working out how many inches each division needs is slow arithmetic that lands you somewhere wrong at the far end of an oval, and dividers do the same job by eye.

Set the points on two marks, find the middle, mark it. Now halve each half again. Keep going until the spacing sits near what you wanted, then stop. The spacing came out at an inch and a quarter, and when I laid the original drawing beside it the two agreed, which does not always happen.

The first pass is a straight down cut with a mallet. I reached for a 7 mm number 11 to take off 5 mm of material. That sounds wasteful. Try the same job with a 5 mm tool and you will tear a corner clean off, because its wings never reach past the edge of what you are chopping.

Then the part that makes a border move instead of repeat. From the point of each chop, carry an arch down to the line, left side and right side both arriving at the same place. Stop about two thirds of the way to the ground. That last third is where the undercut lives, and undercutting into a surface you already flattened is how backgrounds get wrecked. Every moulding profile ever drawn is open to you here, and the online archives are full of catalogues of them. A whole course on carved mouldings sits beside this one, and so does the antique style rosette.

What textures the background?

A punch, and a hammer, never a mallet. That is one instruction I hand over with no reason attached. Use a hammer.

Mine came as a bought set with two rows of teeth, and two rows will not fit anywhere tight. So I filed one row off. Now the single row angles up into an undercut and textures the wall inside the shadow, and that separates a flower from its background better than depth alone does.

You do not have to buy one. File the head of a big nail or a screw and you have a punch. Whatever you use, do the punching when nobody in the house is trying to sleep, because it is easily the loudest part of the whole job.

Does sandpaper belong on a carving?

On this one it did, and that surprised me too. The panel finishes under paint, so I sanded the high spots, went nowhere near the hollows, then burnished the surface with a chip off the bench until it came up almost shiny.

The burnishing is the part worth stealing. It costs nothing, since you are already standing in a pile of chips.

Under a clear finish I would think twice. Paint grade is what made me willing to experiment at all. So read this as permission for one painted panel, not as a rule about relief carving.

When is thin superglue worth using?

Only when paint or lacquer is going over the top. Thin cyanoacrylate soaks straight through a fragile edge and stiffens the fibres.

My leaves finish as thin as a knife, at shoulder height, in a room where somebody will eventually knock into them. So they get stabilised. Leave the same carving raw and unfinished, and I would not put a drop anywhere near it, because the glue changes how the surface takes a finish. Under gilding, paint or shellac, nobody will ever know.

Is this a sensible piece to start on?

Not for a first attempt. Try a simpler flower rosette first, or the beginner path if you have never held a gouge.

What makes this one demanding has nothing to do with any single cut. Laying out an oval. Keeping a bouquet from turning into wallpaper. Judging shadow ahead of the chisel. Those are design problems rather than tool problems, and design is the part almost nobody teaches.

The pattern comes as a download sized to my own table at 24 inches, so yours can match. Browse the rest of the courses if this one is not your piece, or come and stand at the bench with me.

Somewhere in your house there is a flat panel with nothing in the middle of it. What belongs there? Come and carve it with me. Shall we carve?