How to carve using power tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve using power tools 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.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. A pencil and a board. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Institute for artistic wood fabrication into a search box. Fair enough. Before you weigh up anybody's course, here is the leaf itself and the order the work goes in.

How to carve using power tools 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.

Drawing the leaf yourself teaches your hand the sweep before any tool arrives. Trace somebody else's line and your hand learns nothing, so the first lobe that fights the grain will stop you cold.

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 Institute for artistic wood fabrication can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern, carve it, and then draw that leaf from nothing until it stops being hard.

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. Design is the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, and knowing what the tool in your hand can and cannot do. He taught me to think like a tool. Every lesson I record still comes back to it.

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 Institute for artistic wood fabrication will hand you.

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

One plant, two leaves. The Greek leaf is narrow and sharp. The Roman leaf opens, rolls over, and needs depth most beginners cannot cut.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. 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.

Odd places carry this leaf. 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. Acanthus cast right into the barrel.

A short answer to "How to carve using power tools 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. Leave the pencil line standing.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All of it, everywhere, before you shape anything.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. People remember this step.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Do it early and you will break something.

Two and three are where it usually goes wrong. 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 power tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus" is that list, repeated until your hand stops needing it.

How many gouges do you need before day one of Institute for artistic wood fabrication?

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

Sharp beats expensive, every 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. Most people do not want to hear that, which is why I say it first, before you pay a cent to Institute for artistic wood fabrication.

Put the money into wood. 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. Real carving wood is pricey and I say so plainly. You have to be real.

All right. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is forgiving and oak is not. The leaf is made of thin lobes going in all directions, so half of them cut against the grain whatever you do.

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. A fine wood that keeps score. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Institute for artistic wood fabrication 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 photographs well and proves nothing. Knowledge shows up in the boring stage or it does not show up. Put that test to Institute for artistic wood fabrication, mine included.

There are two more things I would check. 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 Institute for artistic wood fabrication will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve using power tools 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, acanthus and everything else. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Some of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, and that is the part I care about.