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.

I have been cutting this leaf for years and the first hour never changes. A pencil and a board. The tools sit tight.

A lot of you land here after typing School of practical wood carving 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

Pencil goes on the wood itself, at carving size. Tape a sheet on top instead and you have skipped the only part that teaches you anything.

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.

Box, center line, arcs. In that order, and the leaf builds itself off them.

Why draw it full size when School of practical wood carving 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. 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. Forty years on, it has not moved.

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 School of practical wood carving 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.

After a class at a woodworking school, one of the men came over. 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.

Buildings are not the half of it. 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 of them about depth. Take them out of order and you will hunt a lobe that is no longer there.

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. Everywhere, before a single lobe gets shaped.
4. Rough the big masses. Begin at the tallest lobe and step down from there.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Everything before this was preparation.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do this early and something snaps off.

The leaf is usually lost at step two or 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 School of practical wood carving?

You need three. A shallow gouge, a deeper gouge, and a V-tool. The mallet is for your wrist.

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. It is not what anyone wants, so I say it now, before you pay a cent to School of practical wood carving.

Spend it on the board, not the steel. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. A two by four from the hardware store kills tools and beginners. Real carving wood is pricey and I say so plainly. You have to be real.

Well then. 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.

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. The same cut in red oak takes a thumb-long splinter with it.

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 School of practical wood carving show you before you pay for it?

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

A good final photo costs nothing to produce. Twenty minutes of pencil work tells you the rest. Put that test to School of practical wood carving, 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 School of practical 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.