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

How to carve decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus is mostly drawing. You put the leaf on the board full size, cut around the outline, take the ground down flat, then shape the lobes, starting with the tallest. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. A pencil and a board. The tools stay on the wall.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving skills academy into a search box. That is fine. Before you look at what anyone is selling, here is the leaf and how the work runs.

How to carve decorative borders with 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.

Once you have drawn it, your hand already knows where it is going. Trace it and nothing goes into your hand, so the first awkward lobe leaves you guessing.

Box, then the center line, then the two arcs. Those three things hold the whole leaf up.

Why draw it full size when Wood carving skills academy 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 is not drawing on paper. Design is the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, and knowing what the tool in your hand can and cannot do. He taught me to think like a tool. Forty years on, it has not moved.

You get the shape from the pattern and the reasons from your own hand. Most people take one and leave the other. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wood carving skills academy will hand you.

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

Same plant, different leaf. The Greek one is narrow and it points. The Roman one opens up, curls over on itself, and asks for far more depth than a beginner has any business trying.

One of my students at a woodworking school came up when the class broke. He said it had never crossed his mind. 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 decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps, mostly about depth. Change the order and you will be chasing wood you already cut off.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Cut beside the line, never through it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Flat everywhere first. No shaping yet.
4. Rough the big masses. Begin at the tallest lobe and step down from there.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Flatness goes away in about an hour.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do it early and you will break something.

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 skills academy?

Three is enough. One shallow gouge, one deeper, one V-tool. A mallet helps your wrist.

A honed cheap chisel beats a blunt good one. 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. People hate hearing it, so I say it up front, before you pay a cent to Wood carving skills academy.

Wood is the better place for your money. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Cut into construction lumber and you will blunt everything and quit. Good basswood is not cheap. Nobody should tell you it is. 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. Red oak will hand you back a splinter as long as your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Superb to look at, forgiving of nothing. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving skills academy show you before you pay for it?

Ask to watch the drawing. Not the finished panel and not the best bits. The dull stretch where the line gets explained.

Any finished leaf can be filmed. That is not evidence. Watch that part and you will know what they have. Put that test to Wood carving skills academy, mine included.

Two more questions to ask. 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 skills academy 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 included, and the rest with it. 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.