How to carve three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements, taught online

How to carve three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements 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.

The leaf has been on my bench a long time, and the start has never moved. A pencil and a board. The chisels stay where they are.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving arts school into a search box. Right. Before you compare anybody, here is the leaf and the order the tools come out.

How to carve three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements starts with a pencil

Get the leaf onto the wood at finished size. A pencil, a board, and about twenty minutes before any steel comes out of the rack.

A leaf you draw yourself teaches your hand the curve before the gouge ever touches it. Trace it and nothing goes into your hand, so the first awkward lobe leaves you guessing.

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 arts school can hand you a pattern?

Use the pattern, by all means. Then draw that leaf cold, over and over, until you no longer need it.

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 was never about paper. It is the laws of space and rhythm, and what the tool will allow. He taught me to think like a tool. Every lesson I record still comes back to it.

Patterns carry shapes. Drawings carry reasons. Almost everybody takes the first and skips the second. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wood carving arts school will hand you.

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

One plant, two leaves. The Greek leaf is narrow and sharp. The Roman leaf opens, rolls over, and needs depth most beginners cannot cut.

Somebody stopped me after a class I taught at a woodworking school. 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.

Acanthus has a habit of turning up. 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 three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements"

Six steps. Five of them decide depth, and the sixth only works if the others came first.

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. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Everything before this was preparation.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Rush this and you lose a tip.

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 three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Wood carving arts school?

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

Price loses to sharpness every single 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. It is not what anyone wants, so I say it now, before you pay a cent to Wood carving arts school.

Spend it on the board, not the steel. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Construction lumber will take your edges off and your interest with them. Good basswood is not cheap. Nobody should tell you it is. You have to be real.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood lets mistakes go. Oak keeps them. The lobes run every direction, so some are always against 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. Do that in red oak and you get a splinter the size of your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Lovely wood. It will find every shortcut you took. By then you can afford the argument.

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

Ask to see the layout stage, not the finished leaf. The part nobody puts in the trailer.

A finished leaf makes a good photograph and a poor argument. Teachers and performers part company at the pencil stage. Put that test to Wood carving arts school, mine included.

Two other things matter. 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 arts school will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve three-dimensional Ancient Greek Acanthus elements".

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.