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.

Many years of this leaf, and I still open the same way every time. 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. 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.

A leaf you draw yourself teaches your hand the curve before the gouge ever touches it. 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 Wood crafting and carving academy can hand you a pattern?

Keep the pattern. Then draw the same leaf freehand, again and again, until you stop reaching for it.

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. Every lesson I record still comes back to it.

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 Wood crafting and carving academy 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.

I was teaching at a woodworking school and a man stayed behind after. 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.

Watch for it and you will see it 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. On a gun barrel, of all places.

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

There are six steps and five concern depth. Wrong order costs you a lobe and an evening.

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. Everywhere, before a single lobe gets shaped.
4. Rough the big masses. Highest lobe first, then work down.
5. Model the pipes and the eyes. Everything before this was preparation.
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 Wood crafting and carving academy?

Three tools. Shallow gouge, deep gouge, V-tool. A mallet too, once your wrist has had enough.

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. Few people like that answer, so I give it early, 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. Carve a construction two by four and you will ruin your edges and quit by Thursday. The wood costs what it costs. You have to be real.

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

What the wood decides for you

Basswood is patient, oak is not, and a leaf of thin lobes means half your cuts go against the grain anyway.

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. Walnut remembers what basswood forgave. By then you can afford the argument.

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

Ask for the boring footage. The drawing. Where a pencil meets the board and somebody says why.

A good final photo costs nothing to produce. Layout is where you find out whether somebody actually knows this. 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 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. Part of what comes in goes to orphans and widows, which is the part I care about most.