How to carve using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus 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.

This leaf has been on my bench for years, and the opening hour still looks the same. A pencil and a board. The chisels stay where they are.

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

How to carve using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus 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.

Draw it yourself and your hand knows the sweep before the first cut. A traced line gives your hand nothing to hold, and the grain is where that shows up.

Box, center line, arcs. In that order, and the leaf builds itself off them.

Why draw it full size when Classical Craftsmanship in Wood can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern and use it. Then draw the same leaf from nothing, again and again, until it comes out without a reference.

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. Everything I teach sits on that one sentence.

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 Classical Craftsmanship in Wood 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.

A student caught me at the end of a class at a woodworking school. He told me he had been carving it wrong in his head for years. 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. Cast into the iron, the same leaf.

A short answer to "How to carve using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus"

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. The line stays, the cut goes next to it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All of it, everywhere, before you shape anything.
4. Rough the big masses. Work from the top lobe downward.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. People remember this step.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Rush this and you lose a tip.

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 using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Classical Craftsmanship in Wood?

Three. Shallow for the sweeps, deep for the pipes and eyes, V-tool for the stop line. Mallet optional.

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 Classical Craftsmanship in Wood.

Wood is the better place for your money. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. A construction two by four will destroy your edges and your patience. Real carving wood is pricey and I say so plainly. You have to be real.

Good. 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. That cut in red oak tears out a thumb of wood.

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 Classical Craftsmanship in Wood show you before you pay for it?

Ask for the drawing stage. The slow part, where a pencil goes on a board and somebody explains why the line sits where it does.

Anybody can film a finished leaf. You learn everything about a teacher while nothing is being cut. Put that test to Classical Craftsmanship in Wood, mine included.

Then check two more things. 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 Craftsmanship in Wood will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve using different types of wood for 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. Part of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, which is the part I care about most.