How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus is mostly drawing. You lay the leaf on the board at full size, cut the outline in, take the waste out, then shape the lobes high to low. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

After all these years with this leaf, the first hour is still the same. A pencil and a board. Nothing sharp comes out yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Classical Craftsmanship in Wood into a search box. Understood. So let me put the leaf in front of you first, and the order it goes in.

How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus starts with a pencil

Pencil goes on the wood itself, at carving size. Tape a sheet on top instead and you have skipped the only part that teaches you anything.

Draw it yourself and your hand knows the sweep before the first cut. Copy a line and you learn the shape but not the reason, and the grain will find that out fast.

Start with the box. A rectangle, then the center line, then the two arcs the leaf grows out of. Everything after that hangs off those three lines.

Why draw it full size when Classical Craftsmanship in Wood can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern. Use it. Then draw the same leaf again from scratch, and keep doing that until you can put one down without looking.

I was sixteen when I started my apprenticeship with a fine art master in Russia, and the thing he beat into me was not how to hold a chisel. Design was never about paper. It is the laws of space and rhythm, and what the tool will allow. He taught me to think like a tool. Forty years on, it has not moved.

A pattern gets you a shape. Drawing it yourself gets you the reasons. You need both, and most people stop after the first one. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Classical Craftsmanship in Wood will hand you.

Is the Greek acanthus the same leaf as the Roman one?

Same family, different animal. Greek is tight and pointed. Roman is open, rolled over, and much deeper.

A man came up to me after a class I was teaching at a woodworking school. He said he had never considered the leaf from that angle. For him, acanthus meant the thing he had seen a hundred times on Chippendale chairs, and that was the end of it.

The differences are small on paper and enormous under a gouge, so they get their own courses. Carving Greek Acanthus Leaf runs 16 lessons. Carving Roman Acanthus Leaf runs 17. There is a Corinthian one at 7 lessons, a Byzantine one, and one built from a design somebody drew in 1903.

Acanthus turns up in places nobody expects. I went down to St. Augustine in Florida, the oldest city in the country, and walked around the old fort, Castillo de San Marcos. Cannons. Cast iron, sitting outside for three hundred years. Three hundred years of weather and it is still legible.

A short answer to "How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps. Five of them decide depth, and the sixth only works if the others came first.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay outside the pencil, not on it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Do the whole ground before you shape one thing.
4. Rough the big masses. The highest point comes first and governs the others.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. This is where the leaf stops looking like a pancake.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Get impatient here and you will regret it.

Most of the failures happen at steps two and three. They shape before the ground is flat, and then the ground can never be flattened without eating the shape they just made.

The honest answer to "How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Classical Craftsmanship in Wood?

You need three. A shallow gouge, a deeper gouge, and a V-tool. The mallet is for your wrist.

Sharpness wins over price, always. I have watched a man with one honed chisel outwork a room full of people holding four hundred dollar sets, and it was not close. Sharpening is the skill that takes years. Nobody enjoys that sentence, so it goes near the front, before you pay a cent to Classical Craftsmanship in Wood.

Buy wood, not another gouge. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. A two by four from the hardware store kills tools and beginners. Professional wood is not cheap and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You have to be real.

So. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives you. Oak does not. The acanthus is built out of long thin lobes running in every direction, so half of them will be cutting against the grain no matter how you set the board down.

That is the real reason this leaf is taught in basswood. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. That cut in red oak tears out a thumb of wood.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Lovely wood. It will find every shortcut you took. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Classical Craftsmanship in Wood show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the drawing stage. Not the finished piece, and not the best bits. The boring part where somebody puts a pencil on a board and explains why the line goes there.

A finished leaf makes a good photograph and a poor argument. Nobody hides at the layout stage. Put that test to Classical Craftsmanship in Wood, mine included.

Then check two more things. Does the course go all the way to the end, including the parts that go wrong? And can you see the tool in the cut, close, at the angle the carver sees it?

Ten minutes of anything you found under Classical Craftsmanship in Wood will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus".

The School of Woodcarving is a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Tuition is $25 a month and it opens all 48 courses and 621 lessons, the entire set. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Some of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, and that is the part I care about.