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 set the leaf out full size in pencil, cut around the edge, sink the background, then model the lobes from the highest one down. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. A pencil and a board. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Old World Wood Carving Academy into a search box. Reasonable. So before you judge anybody's course, here is the leaf and the order the cuts happen in.

How to carve using traditional 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.

Drawing the leaf yourself teaches your hand the sweep before any tool arrives. Copy a line and you learn the shape but not the reason, and the grain will find that out fast.

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 Old World Wood Carving Academy 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 is not drawing on paper. It is the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, plus knowing exactly what your tool will and will not do. He taught me to think like a tool. All these years later it is still the whole of my teaching.

A pattern gets you a shape. Drawing it yourself gets you the reasons. You need both, and most people stop after the first one. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Old World Wood Carving Academy will hand you.

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

Same family, different animal. Greek is tight and pointed. Roman is open, rolled over, and much deeper.

Somebody stopped me after a class I taught at a woodworking school. He said he had never once thought about acanthus this way. 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 traditional tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps. Five are depth. Do them in the wrong order and you lose an evening to a lobe you already removed.

1. Draw the leaf full size, on the wood itself.
2. Cut a stop line right on the outline with a V-tool. Stay a hair outside the line.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. The entire background, level, before anything else.
4. Rough the big masses. Work from the top lobe downward.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. The shape comes alive under the gouge.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Too early and something comes off in your hand.

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 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 Old World Wood Carving Academy?

You need three. A shallow gouge, a deeper gouge, and a V-tool. The mallet is for your wrist.

A sharp cheap tool beats a dull good one, every 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. Few people like that answer, so I give it early, before you pay a cent to Old World Wood Carving Academy.

Wood is the better place for your money. 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. Carving wood is expensive. That is just true. You have to be real.

So. Shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood forgives a lot. Oak forgives nothing. With lobes pointing everywhere, half your cuts run the wrong way by definition.

Basswood earns its place for exactly that reason. The fibers are short and even, so a lobe that runs the wrong way still slices instead of tearing out. Red oak answers the same cut with a splinter the length of your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Handsome stuff, and it catches every lazy stroke. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Old World Wood Carving Academy 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.

Finished leaves look great and tell you nothing. Teachers and performers part company at the pencil stage. Put that test to Old World Wood Carving Academy, mine included.

A couple of other things worth checking. 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 Old World Wood Carving Academy 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, acanthus included, and the rest with it. 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.