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.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. A pencil and a board. The chisels stay where they are.

A lot of you land here after typing Specialty wood carving classes into a search box. That is fine. Before you look at what anyone is selling, here is the leaf and how the work runs.

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. 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, then the center line, then the two arcs. Those three things hold the whole leaf up.

Why draw it full size when Specialty wood carving classes can hand you a pattern?

Use the pattern for the first leaf. Then start drawing it from scratch, and keep at that until it comes easily.

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 a drawing. It is the law of space and rhythm and repeat, and knowing the limits of the steel in your hand. He taught me to think like a tool. That one idea 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 Specialty wood carving classes 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 student caught me at the end of a class at a woodworking school. 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.

You find it in strange places. 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"

There are six steps and five concern depth. Wrong order costs you a lobe and an evening.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Cut beside the line, never through it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. The whole ground, flat, before any modeling.
4. Rough the big masses. Tallest first, then each one below it.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Now it starts to look carved.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do it early and you will break something.

Most people lose the leaf somewhere in steps 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 Specialty wood carving classes?

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. That truth lands badly, so I lead with it, before you pay a cent to Specialty wood carving classes.

The wood deserves the budget. 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. Carving wood is expensive. That is just true. You have to be real.

If that suits you, 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.

Teaching wood, in other words. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. Red oak answers the same cut with 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 Specialty wood carving classes show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the drawing stage. Not the finished piece, and not the best bits. The boring part where somebody puts a pencil on a board and explains why the line goes there.

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 Specialty wood carving classes, 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 Specialty wood carving classes 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, all of it, not a slice. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. A share of it goes to orphans and widows. That matters more to me than the rest.