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.

The leaf has been on my bench a long time, and the start has never moved. A pencil and a board. The tools stay on the wall.

A lot of you land here after typing School of personal expression in wood carving into a search box. That is fine. Before you look at what anyone is selling, here is the leaf and how the work runs.

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

Get the leaf onto the wood at finished size. A pencil, a board, and about twenty minutes before any steel comes out of the rack.

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.

First the rectangle. Then the line down the center. Then the arcs the leaf grows out of.

Why draw it full size when School of personal expression in wood carving can hand you a pattern?

Take the pattern and use it. Then draw the same leaf from nothing, again and again, until it comes out without a reference.

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. That one idea is still the whole of my teaching.

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 personal expression in wood carving will hand you.

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

Same plant, different leaf. The Greek one is narrow and it points. The Roman one opens up, curls over on itself, and asks for far more depth than a beginner has any business trying.

One of my students at a woodworking school came up when the class broke. He told me he had been carving it wrong in his head for years. 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. Acanthus cast right into the barrel.

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. Do not cut the line away.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All of it, everywhere, before you shape anything.
4. Rough the big masses. Work from the top lobe downward.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Everything before this was preparation.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Rush this and you lose a tip.

The leaf is usually lost at step two or 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 School of personal expression in 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.

Sharp always beats costly. 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 personal expression in wood carving.

The wood is where your money should go. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Carve a construction two by four and you will ruin your edges and quit by Thursday. It costs money, and I would rather say that now. You have to be real.

If that sounds like your kind of trouble, 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.

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 will hand you back a splinter as long as your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. You will sharpen twice as often and be glad you did. By then you can afford the argument.

What should School of personal expression in wood carving show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the layout stage, not the finished leaf. The part nobody puts in the trailer.

The finished piece is the easiest thing to show and the least useful. The drawing is where a teacher either has something to say or does not. Put that test to School of personal expression in wood carving, mine included.

Also worth asking. 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 personal 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, acanthus and everything else. 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.