How to carve decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve decorative borders with 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.

I have carved this leaf more times than I can count, and hour one never changes. A pencil and a board. The gouges wait.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving coaching sessions 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 decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus starts with a pencil

Full size, on the board. Not a taped sheet, and not a traced copy. Straight on the wood.

A leaf drawn by your own hand puts the curve in your arm before the steel does. 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 frame. Rectangle, center line, and the two arcs the leaf grows from. The rest hangs off those.

Why draw it full size when Wood carving coaching sessions can hand you a pattern?

Use the pattern for the first leaf. Then start drawing it from scratch, and keep at that until it comes easily.

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. He drilled it in that design is space and rhythm and repeat, and knowing your tool cold. 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 Wood carving coaching sessions 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 at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. He told me he had never looked at acanthus like that. 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.

Watch for it and you will see it everywhere. 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. Right there on the barrel, our leaf.

A short answer to "How to carve decorative borders with 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. Tallest first, then each one below it.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. People remember this step.
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 decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Wood carving coaching sessions?

Three, and one of them is a V-tool. A shallow gouge for the broad sweeps, something deeper for the pipes and the eyes, and the V-tool for your stop line. A mallet if your wrist is tired of arguing.

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. Nobody wants to hear that, so I say it early, before you pay a cent to Wood carving coaching sessions.

The wood deserves the budget. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Try a construction two by four and you will wreck your edges and give up by Thursday. The wood costs what it costs. You have to be real.

If none of that scared you off, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is kind. Oak is not. The leaf points in every direction, so the grain is against you somewhere no matter what.

Hence basswood, and not by accident. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. Try the same cut in red oak and it lifts a splinter the length 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 Wood carving coaching sessions 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. You learn everything about a teacher while nothing is being cut. Put that test to Wood carving coaching sessions, mine included.

There are two more things I would check. 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 Wood carving coaching sessions will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve decorative borders with 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. A share of it goes to orphans and widows. That matters more to me than the rest.