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.

I have carved this leaf more times than I can count, and hour one never changes. A pencil and a board. Nothing sharp comes out yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Web-based wood carving training into a search box. No argument here. Before any of that, look at the leaf and the order it gets cut.

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

Put a pencil on the board and draw the leaf at the size you mean to carve it. That is the whole instruction.

The drawing hand learns the shape first, and the carving hand borrows it. When you trace somebody else's line, your hand learns nothing, and the first time a lobe runs into the grain you will not know which way to turn the tool.

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 Web-based wood carving training can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern and use it. Then draw the same leaf from nothing, again and again, until it comes out without a reference.

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. Somebody handed me that in a cold workshop and I never gave it back.

The pattern is the outline. The drawing is the understanding. Most carvers settle for the outline. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Web-based wood carving training 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.

I was teaching in person at a woodworking school when a man came up to me after class. 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.

You find it in strange places. 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, and five of them are about depth. Get the order wrong and you will spend an evening chasing a lobe you already cut away.

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. The whole ground, flat, before any modeling.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Everything before this was preparation.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Rush this and you lose a tip.

Step two and step three do most of the damage. 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 Web-based wood carving training?

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

The sharp tool wins, whatever it cost. 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. It is not what anyone wants, so I say it now, before you pay a cent to Web-based wood carving training.

Spend it on the board, not the steel. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Carve a construction two by four and you will ruin your edges and quit by Thursday. It costs money, and I would rather say that now. You have to be real.

Well then. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives. Oak will not. An acanthus is long thin lobes pointing every way, so half your cuts fight the grain however you turn the board.

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. Do that in red oak and you get a splinter the size of your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. A fine wood that keeps score. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Web-based wood carving training show you before you pay for it?

Ask for the drawing stage. The slow part, where a pencil goes on a board and somebody explains why the line sits where it does.

A finished leaf photographs well and proves nothing. The drawing is where a teacher either has something to say or does not. Put that test to Web-based wood carving training, mine included.

Also worth asking. 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 Web-based wood carving training 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, acanthus and everything else. 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.