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

How to carve a relief of Ancient Greek Acanthus is mostly drawing. You draw it full size right on the board, stop-cut the outline, take the ground away, then shape each lobe from the top down. 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. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Remote learning academy for wood carvers into a search box. Reasonable. So before you judge anybody's course, here is the leaf and the order the cuts happen in.

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

Get the leaf onto the wood at finished size. A pencil, a board, and about twenty minutes before any steel comes out of the rack.

Drawing the leaf yourself teaches your hand the sweep before any tool arrives. A traced line gives your hand nothing to hold, and the grain is where that shows up.

Rectangle first, always. Then the middle line, then the two arcs that set the growth.

Why draw it full size when Remote learning academy for wood carvers can hand you a pattern?

The pattern is fine. Use it once, then draw the leaf yourself until your hand has it.

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 is not a drawing. It is the law of space and rhythm and repeat, and knowing the limits of the steel in your hand. He taught me to think like a tool. Forty years on, it has not moved.

A shape comes from the pattern. The reasons come from drawing. Very few people go and get the second half. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Remote learning academy for wood carvers will hand you.

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

One plant, different leaves. Greek is narrow, Roman is broad and folded, and the Roman one is much deeper work.

After a class at a woodworking school, one of the men came over. He told me the whole idea was new to him. 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. Cast into the iron, the same leaf.

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

Six steps in all. Five are about depth, and the order is not optional.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay a hair outside the line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All the way across, before you touch a lobe.
4. Rough the big masses. Begin at the tallest lobe and step down from there.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Suddenly it lifts off the board.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Leave it late or lose a lobe.

The leaf is usually lost at step two or 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 Remote learning academy for wood carvers?

Three, honestly. A shallow gouge, one with more sweep, and a V-tool. Bring a mallet if you like your wrist.

Sharp always beats costly. 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. Most people do not want to hear that, which is why I say it first, before you pay a cent to Remote learning academy for wood carvers.

Put the money into wood. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Take a gouge to a two by four and you will be done with carving by Thursday. Proper wood is not cheap, and pretending it is would be a lie. You have to be real.

Good. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is forgiving and oak is not. The leaf is made of thin lobes going in all directions, so half of them cut against the grain whatever you do.

The whole case for basswood sits in that one problem. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. The same cut in red oak takes a thumb-long splinter with it.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Gorgeous, and it shows up careless work in daylight. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Remote learning academy for wood carvers 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.

Anybody can film a finished leaf. You learn everything about a teacher while nothing is being cut. Put that test to Remote learning academy for wood carvers, 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 Remote learning academy for wood carvers 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, all of it, not a slice. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Part of the money goes to orphans and widows, which is why the school exists at all.