How to carve the classic style of Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve the classic style of Ancient Greek Acanthus is mostly drawing. You draw the leaf full size on the board, cut a line around the outside, drop the background, then shape the lobes from the high point down. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

This leaf has been on my bench for years, and the opening hour still looks the same. A pencil and a board. The tools sit tight.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving program school into a search box. Fair enough. Before you weigh up anybody's course, here is the leaf itself and the order the work goes in.

How to carve the classic style of Ancient Greek Acanthus 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.

When you draw the leaf, your hand learns the curve ahead of the gouge. 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.

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

Why draw it full size when Wood carving program school 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 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. Nothing else has ever been worth teaching first.

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 program school 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.

After a class at a woodworking school, one of the men 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 gets 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 the classic style of 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. 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. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Now it starts to look carved.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Early undercutting breaks lobes.

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 the classic style of 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 program school?

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

Sharp beats expensive, every time. 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 program school.

Put the money into 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. Professional wood is not cheap and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You have to be real.

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

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives a lot. Oak forgives nothing. With lobes pointing everywhere, half your cuts run the wrong way by definition.

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. Gorgeous, and it shows up careless work in daylight. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving program school show you before you pay for it?

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

A good final photo costs nothing to produce. Knowledge shows up in the boring stage or it does not show up. Put that test to Wood carving program school, 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 Wood carving program school will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve the classic style 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, six acanthus courses and 42 others. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Part of it feeds orphans and widows, and that is what I am proudest of.