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 put the leaf on the board full size, cut around the outline, take the ground down flat, then shape the lobes, starting with the tallest. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

Years of this leaf, and I still spend the first hour the same way. A pencil and a board. Nothing sharp comes out yet.

A lot of you land here after typing E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting into a search box. No argument here. Before any of that, look at the leaf and the order it gets cut.

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.

Draw it yourself and your hand knows the sweep before the first cut. Borrow the line and your hand stays empty, so the first lobe against the grain becomes a coin flip.

Rectangle first, always. Then the middle line, then the two arcs that set the growth.

Why draw it full size when E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting 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. He drilled it in that design is space and rhythm and repeat, and knowing your tool cold. He taught me to think like a tool. All these years later it is still the whole of my teaching.

You get the shape from the pattern and the reasons from your own hand. Most people take one and leave the other. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting 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.

A man came up to me after a class I was teaching at a woodworking school. He said he had looked at acanthus for years and never seen that. 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.

Nobody warns you how far this leaf travels. 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 using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps. Five are depth. Do them in the wrong order and you lose an evening to a lobe you already removed.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay a hair outside the line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. The whole ground, flat, before any modeling.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. The shape comes alive under the gouge.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Get impatient here and you will regret it.

Steps two and three are where most people lose the leaf. 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 E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting?

Three, honestly. A shallow gouge, one with more sweep, and a V-tool. Bring a mallet if you like your wrist.

A cheap sharp gouge outperforms an expensive dull one. 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 enjoys that sentence, so it goes near the front, before you pay a cent to E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting.

Save it for the wood. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Cut into construction lumber and you will blunt everything and quit. Good basswood is not cheap. Nobody should tell you it is. You have to be real.

So. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives. Oak will not. An acanthus is long thin lobes pointing every way, so half your cuts fight the grain however you turn the board.

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. In red oak the same stroke rips a long splinter free.

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 E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the pencil work. Not the finished carving, not the trailer. The part where the line gets a reason.

A good final photo costs nothing to produce. The drawing is where a teacher either has something to say or does not. Put that test to E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting, 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 E-apprenticeship in wood sculpting 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, six acanthus courses and 42 others. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. This money supports orphans and widows, which is the point for me.