How to carve intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs, taught online

How to carve intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs is mostly drawing. You lay the whole leaf out on the wood, cut a line around it, remove the background, then work the lobes down from the tallest one. 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. The gouges can wait their turn.

A lot of you land here after typing Classical woodcarving Academy into a search box. No argument here. Before any of that, look at the leaf and the order it gets cut.

How to carve intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs starts with a pencil

Put the leaf on the wood at the size it will be carved. A traced printout gets you through one leaf and leaves you stuck on the next.

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.

First the rectangle. Then the line down the center. Then the arcs the leaf grows out of.

Why draw it full size when Classical woodcarving Academy can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern. Use it. Then draw the same leaf again from scratch, and keep doing that until you can put one down without looking.

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. It is the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, plus knowing exactly what your tool will and will not do. He taught me to think like a tool. That one idea 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 Classical woodcarving Academy 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 said he had looked at acanthus for years and never seen 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.

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. Right there on the barrel, our leaf.

A short answer to "How to carve intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs"

There are six steps and five concern depth. Wrong order costs you a lobe and an evening.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Keep the cut just outside the pencil line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All the way across, before you touch a lobe.
4. Rough the big masses. Start high and come down in stages.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. People remember this step.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Too early and something comes off in your hand.

Steps two and three are where most people lose the leaf. 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 intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Classical woodcarving Academy?

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

A cheap sharp gouge outperforms an expensive dull 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. It is not what anyone wants, so I say it now, before you pay a cent to Classical woodcarving Academy.

The wood is where your money should go. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Carve a two by four from the lumber yard and your edges are gone by Thursday. The wood costs what it costs. You have to be real.

So. 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.

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. You will sharpen twice as often and be glad you did. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Classical woodcarving Academy show you before you pay for it?

Ask what the drawing stage looks like. Not the glamour shot at the end.

Anybody can film a finished leaf. Twenty minutes of pencil work tells you the rest. Put that test to Classical woodcarving Academy, 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 Classical woodcarving Academy will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve intricate Ancient Greek Acanthus motifs".

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. A part goes to orphans and widows. That is the reason I keep doing this.