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 leaf on the board at full size, cut the outline in, take the waste out, then shape the lobes high to low. 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. Nothing sharp comes out yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Mastering Classical Wood Carving into a search box. Reasonable. So before you judge anybody's course, here is the leaf and the order the cuts happen in.

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.

The drawing hand learns the shape first, and the carving hand borrows it. Copy a line and you learn the shape but not the reason, and the grain will find that out fast.

First the rectangle. Then the line down the center. Then the arcs the leaf grows out of.

Why draw it full size when Mastering Classical Wood Carving can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern, carve it, and then draw that leaf from nothing until it stops being hard.

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 said design has nothing to do with paper. It is space, rhythm, repetition, and understanding the tool you are holding. He taught me to think like a tool. Nothing else has ever been worth teaching first.

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 Mastering Classical Wood Carving will hand you.

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

Same plant, different leaf. The Greek one is narrow and it points. The Roman one opens up, curls over on itself, and asks for far more depth than a beginner has any business trying.

After a class at a woodworking school, one of the men came over. 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 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. 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. Leave the pencil line standing.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Everywhere, before a single lobe gets shaped.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. People remember this step.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do this early and something snaps off.

Nearly everybody stumbles on two and 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 Mastering Classical Wood Carving?

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.

Sharp always beats costly. 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 Mastering Classical Wood Carving.

Put the money into wood. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Try a construction two by four and you will wreck your edges and give up by Thursday. Professional wood is not cheap and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You have to be real.

All right. 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.

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

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. A fine wood that keeps score. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Mastering Classical Wood Carving 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.

Any finished leaf can be filmed. That is not evidence. Teachers and performers part company at the pencil stage. Put that test to Mastering Classical Wood Carving, mine included.

Two more questions to ask. 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 Mastering Classical Wood Carving 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.