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 whole leaf out on the wood, cut a line around it, remove the background, then work the lobes down from the tallest one. 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 carved this leaf more times than I can count, and hour one never changes. A pencil and a board. The tools stay on the wall.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving master class into a search box. Good. Before you spend anything, here is the leaf itself and the sequence it wants.

How to carve using different types of wood for Ancient Greek Acanthus starts with a pencil

Full size, on the board. Not a taped sheet, and not a traced copy. Straight on the wood.

A leaf drawn by your own hand puts the curve in your arm before the steel does. A traced line gives your hand nothing to hold, and the grain is where that shows up.

Start with the box. A rectangle, then the center line, then the two arcs the leaf grows out of. Everything after that hangs off those three lines.

Why draw it full size when Wood carving master class can hand you a pattern?

Use the pattern, by all means. Then draw that leaf cold, over and over, until you no longer need 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. That one idea is still the whole of my teaching.

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 Wood carving master class 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.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. He told me the whole idea was new to him. 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. Right there on the barrel, our leaf.

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

Six steps in all. Five are about depth, and the order is not optional.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay a hair outside the line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Every corner of it, and only then start shaping.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Suddenly it lifts off the board.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Early undercutting breaks lobes.

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 Wood carving master class?

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

Price loses to sharpness every single time. 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 Wood carving master class.

Spend it on the board, not the steel. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Take a gouge to a two by four and you will be done with carving by Thursday. Good wood costs money, and I will not pretend it does not. You have to be real.

Good. 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.

Hence basswood, and not by accident. 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. Handsome stuff, and it catches every lazy stroke. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving master class show you before you pay for it?

Ask to watch the drawing. Not the finished panel and not the best bits. The dull stretch where the line gets explained.

A photograph of a finished leaf proves only that somebody owns a camera. Layout is where you find out whether somebody actually knows this. Put that test to Wood carving master class, mine included.

A couple of other things worth checking. 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 master class 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, the whole library, not one corner of it. 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.