How to carve stylized versions of Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve stylized versions of 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.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. A pencil and a board. The gouges can wait their turn.

A lot of you land here after typing Introductory courses in relief carving into a search box. Understood. So let me put the leaf in front of you first, and the order it goes in.

How to carve stylized versions 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.

Your hand picks up the curve from the drawing, long before the gouge shows up. Trace somebody else's line and your hand learns nothing, so the first lobe that fights the grain will stop you cold.

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 Introductory courses in relief carving 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. Design is not a drawing. It is the law of space and rhythm and repeat, and knowing the limits of the steel in your hand. He taught me to think like a tool. My courses have never left that idea.

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 Introductory courses in relief carving 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.

A man waited until the room emptied at a woodworking school, then came over. He said he had never considered the leaf from that angle. 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. Even the guns got one.

A short answer to "How to carve stylized versions of Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps in all. Five are about depth, and the order is not optional.

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. Every corner of it, and only then start shaping.
4. Rough the big masses. Start high and come down in stages.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Here the flat thing turns into a leaf.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Too early and something comes off in your hand.

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 stylized versions of Ancient Greek Acanthus" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Introductory courses in relief carving?

Three tools. Shallow gouge, deep gouge, V-tool. A mallet too, once your wrist has had enough.

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. That truth lands badly, so I lead with it, before you pay a cent to Introductory courses in relief carving.

Save it for the wood. 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. Proper wood is not cheap, and pretending it is would be a lie. You have to be real.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, 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.

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. Red oak answers the same cut with a splinter the length of 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 Introductory courses in relief carving show you before you pay for it?

Ask them for the drawing stage. Skip the finished piece. You want the part where somebody explains why the line sits there.

A finished leaf photographs well and proves nothing. Knowledge shows up in the boring stage or it does not show up. Put that test to Introductory courses in relief carving, mine included.

A couple of other things worth checking. 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 Introductory courses in relief carving will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve stylized versions 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, not just the acanthus ones. 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.