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 draw it full size right on the board, stop-cut the outline, take the ground away, then shape each lobe from the top down. The Greek leaf sits shallow and it holds a stiff, formal shape, so the layout decides the carving long before the mallet does.

After all these years with this leaf, the first hour is still the same. A pencil and a board. No steel yet.

A lot of you land here after typing Wood carving arts academy into a search box. No argument here. Before any of that, look at the leaf and the order it gets cut.

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

Full size, on the board. Not a taped sheet, and not a traced copy. Straight on the wood.

Draw it yourself and your hand knows the sweep before the first cut. Trace the line and you get a shape with no reasons behind it, which the wood notices immediately.

The box comes first. A rectangle, a line down the middle, two arcs. Build the leaf on top of that.

Why draw it full size when Wood carving arts 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. Paper is not design. Space is. Rhythm and repetition are. So is knowing your tool. He taught me to think like a tool. Forty years on, it has not moved.

A shape comes from the pattern. The reasons come from drawing. Very few people go and get the second half. A printed sheet is usually the very first thing Wood carving arts 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 told me the whole idea was new to him. 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.

Nobody warns you how far this leaf travels. 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. And there is the acanthus, right on the barrel.

A short answer to "How to carve using traditional tools for Ancient Greek Acanthus"

Six steps, five of them about depth. Take them out of order and you will hunt a lobe that is no longer there.

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 pencil line visible.
3. Take the background down to one even depth. All the way across, before you touch a lobe.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Flatness goes away in about an hour.
6. Undercut the edges. Last. Get impatient here and you will regret it.

Most people lose the leaf somewhere in 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 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 Wood carving arts academy?

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

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 Wood carving arts academy.

Put the money into wood. Basswood, lindenwood, limewood, whatever your part of the world calls it. Construction lumber will take your edges off and your interest with them. Professional wood is not cheap and I am not going to pretend otherwise. You have to be real.

If that suits you, shall we carve?

What the wood decides for you

Basswood will forgive you. Oak keeps the receipt. Thin lobes run every way, so half the cuts oppose the grain.

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. In red oak the same cut lifts a splinter the length of your thumb.

Later, when your hand knows the leaf, move to walnut. Gorgeous, and it shows up careless work in daylight. By then you can afford the argument.

What should Wood carving arts academy show you before you pay for it?

Ask to see the drawing stage. Not the finished piece, and not the best bits. The boring part where somebody puts a pencil on a board and explains why the line goes there.

A photograph of a finished leaf proves only that somebody owns a camera. Nobody hides at the layout stage. Put that test to Wood carving arts 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 Wood carving arts 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, six acanthus courses and 42 others. It renews automatically every month and you can stop it whenever you like. Some of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, and that is the part I care about.