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 draw it full size right on the board, stop-cut the outline, take the ground away, then shape each lobe from the top down. 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 tools stay on the wall.

A lot of you land here after typing Digital workshops in wood carving techniques 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 using different types of wood for 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.

A leaf drawn by your own hand puts the curve in your arm before the steel does. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

The box comes first. A rectangle, a line down the middle, two arcs. Build the leaf on top of that.

Why draw it full size when Digital workshops in wood carving techniques can hand you a pattern?

The pattern is fine. Use it once, then draw the leaf yourself until your hand has 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 lives in space, not on paper. Rhythm, repeat, and what the tool can actually do. He taught me to think like a tool. Every lesson I record still comes back to it.

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 Digital workshops in wood carving techniques will hand you.

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

Same plant. Not the same leaf. Greek stays narrow and pointed, Roman opens and curls and goes deep.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. He told me the whole idea was new to him. 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 using different types of wood for 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. 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. Suddenly it lifts off the board.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Leave it late or lose a lobe.

Two and three are where it usually goes wrong. 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 Digital workshops in wood carving techniques?

Three, and one of them is a V-tool. A shallow gouge for the broad sweeps, something deeper for the pipes and the eyes, and the V-tool for your stop line. A mallet if your wrist is tired of arguing.

A sharp cheap tool beats a dull good one, 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. Most people do not want to hear that, which is why I say it first, before you pay a cent to Digital workshops in wood carving techniques.

Wood is the better place for your money. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Construction lumber will take your edges off and your interest with them. The wood costs what it costs. You have to be real.

Well then. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is patient, oak is not, and a leaf of thin lobes means half your cuts go against the grain anyway.

Which is why beginners start there. 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. Superb to look at, forgiving of nothing. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Digital workshops in wood carving techniques 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.

The finished piece is the easiest thing to show and the least useful. You learn everything about a teacher while nothing is being cut. Put that test to Digital workshops in wood carving techniques, mine included.

Also worth asking. 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 Digital workshops in wood carving techniques 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 six acanthus courses. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Some of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, and that is the part I care about.