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.

The leaf has been on my bench a long time, and the start has never moved. A pencil and a board. The tools sit tight.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving fundamentals school into a search box. Right. Before you compare anybody, here is the leaf and the order the tools come out.

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.

Draw it yourself and your hand knows the sweep before the first cut. A traced line gives your hand nothing to hold, and the grain is where that shows up.

Rectangle first, always. Then the middle line, then the two arcs that set the growth.

Why draw it full size when Wood carving fundamentals school can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern and use it. Then draw the same leaf from nothing, again and again, until it comes out without a reference.

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 was never about paper. It is the laws of space and rhythm, and what the tool will allow. He taught me to think like a tool. Nothing else has ever been worth teaching first.

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 Wood carving fundamentals school will hand you.

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

Same plant, two shapes. The Greek leaf points. The Roman leaf opens up and turns over on itself.

Somebody stopped me after a class I taught at a woodworking school. He said he had looked at acanthus for years and never seen that. 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. On a gun barrel, of all places.

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

Six steps. Five of them decide depth, and the sixth only works if the others came first.

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. Do the whole ground before you shape one thing.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Flatness goes away in about an hour.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Leave it late or lose a lobe.

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 Wood carving fundamentals school?

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

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 Wood carving fundamentals school.

Wood is the better place for your money. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Carve a two by four from the lumber yard and your edges are gone by Thursday. The wood costs what it costs. 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.

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 will hand you back a splinter as long as your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Handsome stuff, and it catches every lazy stroke. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving fundamentals school show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the pencil work. Not the finished carving, not the trailer. The part where the line gets a reason.

A finished leaf makes a good photograph and a poor argument. Layout is where you find out whether somebody actually knows this. Put that test to Wood carving fundamentals school, 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 Wood carving fundamentals school 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. This money supports orphans and widows, which is the point for me.