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 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 been cutting this leaf for years and the first hour never changes. A pencil and a board. The tools sit tight.

A lot of you land here after typing Online coaching for wood carving skills 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

Put the leaf on the wood at the size it will be carved. A traced printout gets you through one leaf and leaves you stuck on the next.

Your hand picks up the curve from the drawing, long before the gouge shows up. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

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

Why draw it full size when Online coaching for wood carving skills can hand you a pattern?

Keep the pattern. Then draw the same leaf freehand, again and again, until you stop reaching for 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. Somebody handed me that in a cold workshop and I never gave it back.

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 Online coaching for wood carving skills 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 in person at a woodworking school when a man came up to me after class. 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.

Acanthus turns up in places nobody expects. 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 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. Cut beside the line, never through it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Everywhere, before a single lobe gets shaped.
4. Rough the big masses. The highest point comes first and governs the others.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. This is where the leaf stops looking like a pancake.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Undercut too soon and a lobe goes.

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 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 Online coaching for wood carving skills?

Three, and one of them is a V-tool. A shallow gouge for the broad sweeps, something deeper for the pipes and the eyes, and the V-tool for your stop line. A mallet if your wrist is tired of arguing.

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. Most people do not want to hear that, which is why I say it first, before you pay a cent to Online coaching for wood carving skills.

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

Well then. 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.

That is the real reason this leaf is taught in basswood. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. That cut in red oak tears out a thumb of wood.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Lovely wood. It will find every shortcut you took. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Online coaching for wood carving skills 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. Knowledge shows up in the boring stage or it does not show up. Put that test to Online coaching for wood carving skills, mine included.

Two other things matter. 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 Online coaching for wood carving skills 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 included, and the rest with it. 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.