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 set the leaf out full size in pencil, cut around the edge, sink the background, then model the lobes from the highest one down. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

After all these years with this leaf, the first hour is still the same. A pencil and a board. The gouges stay in the rack.

A lot of you land here after typing Remote learning academy for wood carvers 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

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. When you trace somebody else's line, your hand learns nothing, and the first time a lobe runs into the grain you will not know which way to turn the tool.

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

Why draw it full size when Remote learning academy for wood carvers 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 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. Everything I teach sits on that one sentence.

The pattern is the outline. The drawing is the understanding. Most carvers settle for the outline. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Remote learning academy for wood carvers will hand you.

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

Same plant behind both. Greek is a narrow pointed leaf. Roman is wide, curled, and a lot more depth.

One of my students at a woodworking school came up when the class broke. He said he had never considered the leaf from that angle. 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 gets everywhere. 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. Somebody put acanthus on a cannon.

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

Six steps, mostly about depth. Change the order and you will be chasing wood you already cut off.

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 pencil line visible.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Every corner of it, and only then start shaping.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Suddenly it lifts off the board.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do it early and you will break something.

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 Remote learning academy for wood carvers?

Three. A shallow gouge for the sweeps, a deeper one for the pipes and eyes, and a V-tool for the stop line. Add a mallet when your wrist complains.

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 enjoys that sentence, so it goes near the front, before you pay a cent to Remote learning academy for wood carvers.

Wood is the better place for your money. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. A two by four from the hardware store kills tools and beginners. It costs money, and I would rather say that now. You have to be real.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives a lot. Oak forgives nothing. With lobes pointing everywhere, half your cuts run the wrong way by definition.

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. Try the same cut in red oak and it lifts a splinter the length of 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 Remote learning academy for wood carvers show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the layout stage, not the finished leaf. The part nobody puts in the trailer.

Any finished leaf can be filmed. That is not evidence. Watch that part and you will know what they have. Put that test to Remote learning academy for wood carvers, 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 Remote learning academy for wood carvers 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, acanthus and everything else. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Part of the money goes to orphans and widows, which is why the school exists at all.