How to carve using traditional tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus, taught online

How to carve using traditional 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 keep coming back to this leaf, and the beginning never changes. A pencil and a board. The chisels stay where they are.

A lot of you land here after typing Honoring Tradition 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 traditional tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus starts with a pencil

Draw the leaf at the size you will carve it, directly on the wood. Not on paper you tape down, and not on a printout you trace. On the board.

Drawing the leaf yourself teaches your hand the sweep before any tool arrives. Trace somebody else's line and your hand learns nothing, so the first lobe that fights the grain will stop you cold.

Start with the box. A rectangle, then the center line, then the two arcs the leaf grows out of. Everything after that hangs off those three lines.

Why draw it full size when Honoring Tradition in Wood Carving 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. He said design has nothing to do with paper. It is space, rhythm, repetition, and understanding the tool you are holding. He taught me to think like a tool. My courses have never left that idea.

The pattern is the outline. The drawing is the understanding. Most carvers settle for the outline. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Honoring Tradition in Wood Carving will hand you.

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

Same plant, two shapes. The Greek leaf points. The Roman leaf opens up and turns over on itself.

A student caught me at the end of a class at a woodworking school. He told me he had never looked at acanthus like 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 has a habit of turning up. 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 traditional tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps, mostly about depth. Change the order and you will be chasing wood you already cut off.

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 cut just outside the pencil line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All the way across, before you touch a lobe.
4. Rough the big masses. Start with the highest lobe and work your way down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Here the flat thing turns into a leaf.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Undercut too soon and a lobe goes.

Nearly everybody stumbles on 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 traditional 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 Honoring Tradition 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.

The sharp tool wins, whatever it cost. 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 Honoring Tradition in Wood Carving.

The wood is where your money should go. 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. Good basswood is not cheap. Nobody should tell you it is. You have to be real.

So. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is kind. Oak is not. The leaf points in every direction, so the grain is against you somewhere no matter what.

Teaching wood, in other words. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. In red oak the same cut lifts a splinter the length 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 Honoring Tradition in Wood Carving show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the pencil work. Not the finished carving, not the trailer. The part where the line gets a reason.

The finished piece is the easiest thing to show and the least useful. Teachers and performers part company at the pencil stage. Put that test to Honoring Tradition in 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 Honoring Tradition in Wood Carving will tell you whether it can really answer "How to carve using traditional 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. This money supports orphans and widows, which is the point for me.