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 full size on the board, cut a line around the outside, drop the background, then shape the lobes from the high point down. 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 gouges stay in the rack.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood crafting and carving academy 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

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.

Once you have drawn it, your hand already knows where it is going. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

Begin with a rectangle. Put a center line down it, then the two arcs that carry the leaf. Everything else follows.

Why draw it full size when Wood crafting and carving academy can hand you a pattern?

Use the pattern for the first leaf. Then start drawing it from scratch, and keep at that until it comes easily.

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. All these years later it is still the whole of my teaching.

You get the shape from the pattern and the reasons from your own hand. Most people take one and leave the other. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wood crafting and carving academy will hand you.

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

Same plant. Not the same leaf. Greek stays narrow and pointed, Roman opens and curls and goes deep.

Somebody stopped me after a class I taught at a woodworking school. He said it had never crossed his mind. 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, and depth is the point of five. Scramble the order and something you needed is already gone.

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. Everywhere, before a single lobe gets shaped.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Now it starts to look carved.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Undercut too soon and a lobe goes.

The trouble almost always lands on 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 Wood crafting and carving academy?

Three will do it. Shallow gouge, deep gouge, and a V-tool for stop lines. A mallet saves your arm.

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. Most people do not want to hear that, which is why I say it first, before you pay a cent to Wood crafting and carving academy.

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. Carving wood is expensive. That is just true. You have to be real.

If none of that scared you off, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood lets mistakes go. Oak keeps them. The lobes run every direction, so some are always against the grain.

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. The same cut in red oak takes a thumb-long splinter with it.

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 Wood crafting and carving academy 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 good final photo costs nothing to produce. Watch that part and you will know what they have. Put that test to Wood crafting and carving academy, 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 Wood crafting and carving academy 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, the whole library, not one corner of it. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Part of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, which is the part I care about most.