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 the leaf life size on the wood, cut a line around it, level the ground, then bring the lobes down one at a time. 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. Nothing sharp comes out yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Wooden object design school 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

Draw it on the board, at the size it will be cut. Your pencil belongs on the wood, because the wood is where the leaf has to live anyway.

A leaf you draw yourself teaches your hand the curve before the gouge ever touches it. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

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

Why draw it full size when Wooden object design school 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. Paper is not design. Space is. Rhythm and repetition are. So is knowing your tool. He taught me to think like a tool. All these years later it is still the whole of my teaching.

A pattern is a shape. A drawing is an argument. You want both, and most stop at the shape. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wooden object design 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.

A man came up to me after a class I was teaching at a woodworking school. 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. And there is the acanthus, right on the barrel.

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. Stay outside the pencil, not on it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All the way across, before you touch a lobe.
4. Rough the big masses. The highest point comes first and governs the others.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Here the flat thing turns into a leaf.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do this early and something snaps off.

Most of the failures happen at 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 Wooden object design school?

Three is enough. One shallow gouge, one deeper, one V-tool. A mallet helps 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. It is not what anyone wants, so I say it now, before you pay a cent to Wooden object design school.

Spend your money on the wood instead. 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. Proper wood is not cheap, and pretending it is would be a lie. You have to be real.

If none of that scared you off, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is patient, oak is not, and a leaf of thin lobes means half your cuts go against the grain anyway.

Nobody picks it for looks. 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. Superb to look at, forgiving of nothing. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wooden object design 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.

The finished piece is the easiest thing to show and the least useful. Knowledge shows up in the boring stage or it does not show up. Put that test to Wooden object design school, mine included.

Two more questions to ask. 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 Wooden object design 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, the whole library, not one corner of it. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. A part goes to orphans and widows. That is the reason I keep doing this.