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.

Years of this leaf, and I still spend the first hour the same way. A pencil and a board. The tools sit tight.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving training school 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

Draw it on the board, at the size it will be cut. Your pencil belongs on the wood, because the wood is where the leaf has to live anyway.

When you draw the leaf, your hand learns the curve ahead of the gouge. When the line is somebody else's, your hand has no opinion, and the grain will punish that.

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 Wood carving training school can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern, carve it, and then draw that leaf from nothing until it stops being hard.

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. All these years later it is still the whole of my teaching.

A pattern gives you the shape. The drawing gives you the reasons. Both matter, and most people quit after the shape. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wood carving training school will hand you.

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

Same plant. Not the same leaf. Greek stays narrow and pointed, Roman opens and curls and goes deep.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. He said nobody had ever put acanthus to him that way. 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.

Nobody warns you how far this leaf travels. 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. Acanthus cast right into the barrel.

A short answer to "How to carve decorative borders with Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps, and depth is the point of five. Scramble the order and something you needed is already gone.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Do not cut the line away.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Do the whole ground before you shape one thing.
4. Rough the big masses. Work from the top lobe downward.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. This is where the leaf stops looking like a pancake.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do it early and you will break something.

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 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 training school?

Three, honestly. A shallow gouge, one with more sweep, and a V-tool. Bring a mallet if you like 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. Nobody wants to hear that, so I say it early, before you pay a cent to Wood carving training school.

The wood is where your money should go. 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. Good wood costs money, and I will not pretend it does not. You have to be real.

All right. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood will forgive you. Oak keeps the receipt. Thin lobes run every way, so half the cuts oppose the grain.

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. Walnut remembers what basswood forgave. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving training school 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.

Finished leaves look great and tell you nothing. Nobody hides at the layout stage. Put that test to Wood carving training school, mine included.

Two more, then decide. 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 training school 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, six acanthus courses and 42 others. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Part of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, which is the part I care about most.