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 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. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing In-depth wood carving seminars into a search box. Makes sense. So first, here is the leaf and the order the work has to go 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.

The drawing hand learns the shape first, and the carving hand borrows it. Trace somebody else's line and your hand learns nothing, so the first lobe that fights the grain will stop you cold.

Begin with a rectangle. Put a center line down it, then the two arcs that carry the leaf. Everything else follows.

Why draw it full size when In-depth wood carving seminars 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 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. My courses have never left that idea.

A pattern gives you the shape. The drawing gives you the reasons. Both matter, and most people quit after the shape. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing In-depth wood carving seminars 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.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. He said he had never once thought about acanthus this 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 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. Acanthus cast right into the barrel.

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

Six steps, and five of them are about depth. Get the order wrong and you will spend an evening chasing a lobe you already cut away.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay outside the pencil, not on it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Do the whole ground before you shape one thing.
4. Rough the big masses. Start high and come down in stages.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. This is where the leaf stops looking like a pancake.
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 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 In-depth wood carving seminars?

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

Sharpness wins over price, always. 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. Few people like that answer, so I give it early, before you pay a cent to In-depth wood carving seminars.

Spend your money on the wood instead. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Carve a construction two by four and you will ruin your edges and quit by Thursday. It costs money, and I would rather say that now. You have to be real.

Still here? Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood will forgive you. Oak keeps the receipt. Thin lobes run every way, so half the cuts oppose the grain.

The whole case for basswood sits in that one problem. 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. You will sharpen twice as often and be glad you did. By then you can afford the argument.

What should In-depth wood carving seminars show you before you pay for it?

Ask to watch the drawing. Not the finished panel and not the best bits. The dull stretch where the line gets explained.

The finished piece is the easiest thing to show and the least useful. Teachers and performers part company at the pencil stage. Put that test to In-depth wood carving seminars, mine included.

Two more, then decide. 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 In-depth wood carving seminars 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. Part of it feeds orphans and widows, and that is what I am proudest of.