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 out full size on the board, cut a line around the outside, take the background down, then shape the lobes, tallest one first. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

This leaf has been on my bench for years, and the opening hour still looks the same. A pencil and a board. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing School of artistic expression in wood carving 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

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.

Drawing the leaf yourself teaches your hand the sweep before any tool arrives. 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 School of artistic expression in wood carving 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. Design was never about paper. It is the laws of space and rhythm, and what the tool will allow. He taught me to think like a tool. Every lesson I record still comes back to it.

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 School of artistic expression in wood carving 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.

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. Somebody put acanthus on a cannon.

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. Cut beside the line, never through it.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. The entire background, level, before anything else.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. This is where the leaf stops looking like a pancake.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Get impatient here and you will regret it.

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 School of artistic expression in wood carving?

Three tools. Shallow gouge, deep gouge, V-tool. A mallet too, once your wrist has had enough.

A cheap sharp gouge outperforms an expensive dull one. 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 School of artistic expression in wood carving.

Spend your money on the wood instead. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. A two by four from the hardware store kills tools and beginners. Real carving wood is pricey and I say so plainly. You have to be real.

So. 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.

So the leaf goes on basswood every time. 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. A fine wood that keeps score. By then you can afford the argument.

What should School of artistic expression in 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.

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 School of artistic expression in wood carving, mine included.

Then check two more things. 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 artistic expression in 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, six acanthus courses and 42 others. 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.