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.

I have carved this leaf more times than I can count, and hour one never changes. A pencil and a board. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing School of advanced wood carving into a search box. Makes sense. So first, here is the leaf and the order the work has to go in.

How to carve using power tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus starts with a pencil

Put a pencil on the board and draw the leaf at the size you mean to carve it. That is the whole instruction.

A leaf drawn by your own hand puts the curve in your arm before the steel does. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

Box, center line, arcs. In that order, and the leaf builds itself off them.

Why draw it full size when School of advanced wood carving 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 lives in space, not on paper. Rhythm, repeat, and what the tool can actually do. He taught me to think like a tool. Everything I teach sits on that one sentence.

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 School of advanced wood carving will hand you.

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

One plant, different leaves. Greek is narrow, Roman is broad and folded, and the Roman one is much deeper work.

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.

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. Three hundred years of weather and it is still legible.

A short answer to "How to carve using power tools 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. Keep the pencil line visible.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. Flat everywhere first. No shaping yet.
4. Rough the big masses. Work from the top lobe downward.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Suddenly it lifts off the board.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Too early and something comes off in your hand.

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 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 School of advanced wood carving?

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.

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. People hate hearing it, so I say it up front, before you pay a cent to School of advanced wood carving.

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. 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 forgives you. Oak does not. The acanthus is built out of long thin lobes running in every direction, so half of them will be cutting against the grain no matter how you set the board down.

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. Do that in red oak and you get a splinter the size 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 School of advanced wood carving show you before you pay for it?

Ask for the drawing stage. The slow part, where a pencil goes on a board and somebody explains why the line sits where it does.

Anybody can film a finished leaf. Layout is where you find out whether somebody actually knows this. Put that test to School of advanced wood carving, 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 School of advanced wood carving 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, not just the acanthus ones. 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.