Carving Furniture Panel – Design – Part 1

This is one panel carved across three courses, and you are at the beginning of it. No gouge yet. We draw first, and when the drawing is right the wood gets carved in the two courses that follow.

Do you draw the design on paper first, or straight on the wood?

Paper first, and the paper gets glued right onto the board. I cut a sheet about an inch bigger than the panel all the way around, spray photo mount on the wood and on the paper both, press them together and trim the edge. Now I have a white surface to draw on, and white takes a pencil line and gives it back clean when I erase.

Under that paper is walnut, and not the walnut you order from a yard. I did a whole house in this stuff once. Doors almost three inches thick, baseboards, casings, every piece of furniture, all out of the same purple stock. Purple walnut. Most people have never seen any and they think I am telling stories. What I had left were two thin boards with splits in them, so I resawed and glued them like a book, and now the cathedral grain on one half answers the cathedral on the other.

The panel is 27 1/4 by 15 1/2 inches (692 by 394 mm) and 10 mm thick, three eighths of an inch. Thin. Nothing in the whole design will go deeper than 5 mm, three sixteenths, so this stays low relief that still has to look like a three dimensional world.

The panel does not lie flat on a bench while I work, either. I screwed the plate off my carver's vice onto the back of a sheet of MDF and dropped that into the vice, so the whole thing tilts, rises and spins around to face me. The MDF carries 20 mm holes, three quarters of an inch, and two clamps hold the work wherever I put it. You do not need my vice. You need a surface you can turn.

What pencil do you use to draw a wood carving pattern?

A soft pencil for the drawing, and charcoal only at the very end. Right now there is an 8B in my hand, about as soft as pencils come, though 2B or 4B or 6B does the same job and even a hard one will not stop you. The eraser matters more than the pencil does. I draw the same leaf five or six times before I keep one, so a line that will not lift off the paper is no use to me.

Charcoal comes last, and only where I want shadow. Rub a little into the background and the panel reads as three dimensions, which tells me whether a movement works before I risk a chisel on it. Charcoal is close to impossible to erase, though, so I keep it well away from any area I am still arguing with. A marker does the same job. Trace over the pencil once you are sure.

Where should the focal point go on a carved panel?

Put two focal points on the board and let one of them win. Every movie has a hero and somebody standing against the hero, and a panel gets built the same way. My strong cluster sits near the top, the quieter one near the bottom, and the eye travels between them.

Finding those two spots is geometry, not feeling. The simple road is the rule of thirds. Divide the board in three across and three down, and the four crossings hand you your candidates. Photographers and cinematographers live on that grid. I could have stopped there. My goal was a piece of art, though, and the work that has survived followed the golden ratio instead.

So I mark a plus for the hero and a minus for the antagonist. From that moment on, every leaf I draw has a job, which is to carry the eye between the two marks and back again.

What is the golden ratio in wood carving design?

The golden ratio splits a line about 62 to 38, and on a panel it marks where the eye wants to rest. The number is 0.618. Fibonacci wrote it down, Leonardo da Vinci built with it, and Bach hid it inside his music, which should tell you the rule is older and bigger than woodwork.

You do not need the decimal. Divide any line into ten parts and go six. Six out of ten. My students say it back to me and still land it wrong the first few times, because six of ten feels like eyeballing and it is not.

A little caliper on my bench divides any distance into ten parts and shows me the six. I use it to check myself, not to draw. Most times my eye had already put the pencil close to where the tool says it belongs, and the times it did not are why I keep the tool.

How do you find the golden section on a board that is not proportional?

Run one diagonal corner to corner, then run a second line off the corner of the true square inside the board, and the golden point sits where they cross. My board is nowhere near a golden rectangle. Measured long against short it lands close to a root four rectangle, which is two squares end to end, so the clean arithmetic goes nowhere useful.

So I put the numbers away and draw. One diagonal each way, corner to corner. Then I find the true square inside the panel, 15 1/2 inches on a side, mark its far corner, and run a line out to the outside corner of the board. Where those two lines meet is my major center. I repeat the whole business on the inner border, 11 1/4 inches (286 mm), and that gives me the minor. Four crosses on the paper, and I have not calculated a thing.

Students look at that stage and see spaghetti. Fair enough. Twenty lines on a board and not one of them will ever be carved. Every one of them stays inside the finished panel anyway, the way framing inside a wall holds the house up after the drywall goes on.

How wide should the border be around a carved furniture panel?

Let the Fibonacci sequence pick the widths instead of your mood. My board is 10 mm thick, so ten is my number one. Add ten to ten and you get twenty, which is 3/4 of an inch, and that is the space I leave open before any carving begins. Keep going and the sequence hands you thirty, then fifty, and 50 mm off the edge is exactly where my last border line wanted to sit.

The outer 10 mm never gets touched at all. That strip vanishes into the rails and stiles the day the panel goes into a door, but your brain still sees the edge of the design where it used to be, so the number has to be right even when nobody will look at it. Inside of that I run a 5 mm band, three sixteenths, which reads as an applied molding although nothing is applied. Every one of those figures came off the same short list. The eye feels it long before the head can name it.

Repetition is doing the work here, and it is a real law with a name. Rhythm in music is the same animal. A 5 mm band echoing another 5 mm band an inch away settles an eye, and nobody looking ever knows why the panel feels calm.

Which side of a panel does the eye start reading from?

Western eyes start at the top left and travel down to the right, while Eastern eyes start at the top right and go the other way. Sounds like nothing. Draw a line across a page, put a little car on it, and ask an American which way the car is going. He will tell you downhill, every time, because he began at the left. Flip the drawing and the same car is climbing.

I am Russian, and Russia has an Asian half and a European half. My students live on both sides of that line, so I refused to choose. The main movement starts in the upper left and runs down across the board, then the bottom cluster gets built so the eye can also come in from the right and read backward. Confusing brains is the whole point, and nobody I know has tried it on a furniture panel.

Both diagonals carry old names. The one climbing to the upper right is the baroque diagonal, and baroque there means strange, nothing to do with the style. Its opposite is called sinister, which only means left. Once you know the two lines are on your board you will keep landing the tips of your leaves on them, and the panel will hold together for reasons no visitor can see.

Fourteen lessons of this go by before I sharpen anything. If you want to watch the drawing come up line by line and then see the same panel carved, come and carve this one with me.

How do you draw acanthus leaves and flowers so they look natural?

Repeat one movement at different sizes and never let two shapes match. Three flowers grow in my main cluster. One is the biggest. Number two comes down a size, number three smaller again, and the day all three come out equal the group is dead. Leaves behave the same. A large acanthus sits on top, a second one hides underneath it, and that overlap is the only depth you get out of 5 mm of wood.

There is a rule I break on camera and then fix. A leaf that runs straight into another line and stops dead makes a T, and a T stops the eye cold. The stop does not have to be visible either. If my leaf tip lands on an invisible line I drew an hour earlier, it still feels wrong, so I erase it and swing the leaf past instead.

Everything has to interweave. A movement that will not flow into its neighbor gets erased, and I have wiped out an hour of drawing over one leaf that refused to join the rest. Volutes carry much of that load. A tight spiral turning back on itself fills a corner and picks up a curve from somewhere else on the board, then hands the eye back to the main movement. Old carvers used a lot of volutes and so do I.

The acanthus sits highest. Behind it lies the background, and I mark the concave hollows and the convex humps as I go so that later I know where shadow has to live. On a 5 mm panel that decision is the whole illusion.

Petals have a habit worth knowing. The outer ring of a flower grows downhill even while the rest of it climbs, so the bottom layer always falls away from you. I do not finish them at this stage. Movement goes in, a little charcoal for shadow, and the rest waits for the gouge, because in low relief a flower finds its shape under the tool.

How many flowers and leaves should be in an ornament?

Count them, and land the count on a Fibonacci number. My bottom cluster has three flowers. I drew four leaves around them, added a fifth, and five still did not fill the space, so I kept going until there were eight. One, two, three, five, eight. The same short list that gave me a 10 mm border gives me the head count.

Counting flowers sounds strange. I do it anyway, and when the carving starts I will count the petals the same way.

You are also going to erase more than you draw. I step back from the bench every few minutes and just stare, and half the time I go get the eraser. Around lesson nine I threw out a whole double acanthus because the area had gone crowded, kept the outline, and drew one bigger leaf with the second one hiding underneath. A roll of tape sits on my bench, and when a curve gives somebody trouble I tell them to trace around it. Between lesson eleven and lesson twelve there is a long gap, because I moved and had to set up a new shop, and this panel just sat there through all of it.

I would rather call this an apprenticeship than a school. You watch me work, take what you like, and leave the rest. Fourteen lessons later the pencil work is done and I like it, except for one element up near the top that I erased at the last minute because it just did not look right to me. Then the drawing goes out full size for the students to print and glue down. If you want this geometry in your hands instead of your notes, get Access to the whole panel course. Shall we carve?