Carving Greek Acanthus Leaf 11

Every pass you make removes wood, and not one of them puts any back. A chip on the workshop floor is gone. Some breaks take glue and plenty of them never do, and that single fact should govern the speed of your hand far more than any rule about which gouge to pick up.

I slipped in this lesson. Watch the panel around the four minute mark and there is a mark I did not intend, and I left the whole thing in rather than editing it away, because a lesson that only shows the passes that worked teaches nobody anything.

Today is the undercutting carrying on around the Greek acanthus, and the reason I keep saying slow down.

The rules that keep a panel alive at this stage

• Wood never goes back on.
• Rushing is the single most expensive habit in this craft, because the minutes you save on one pass come back as an hour of repair, and sometimes the repair is not available at any price.
• Micro cuts, always.
• A brand new knife will fight you until you hone it to a mirror.
• Cross grain and contrary grain are two different animals.
• Flow is a three dimensional idea, so a line that looks right from above can still be wavy when you sight along the panel edge, and that wave will bother you every time you walk past it for the next thirty years.

What does deduction mean at a bench?

Subtraction is the only move on offer. A painter adds another layer over the one that went wrong, a potter wets the clay and starts again, and we have neither option. Remove the right wood and the shape appears. Lose the wrong wood and what you wanted is now bigger than the board can still give you.

Whatever pass you are about to make is permanent, so treat it that way.

What actually happens when you rush?

You go slower. People rush because they believe speed finishes the job, and what really happens is the tool escapes, a lobe loses a corner, and the next two hours go on a repair that never quite disappears. I am guilty of it as much as anybody. Forty years at a bench has not cured the temptation, only taught me to notice it arriving.

Can a broken carving be fixed?

Sometimes. Where the break happened decides it. A clean snap across a thick neck takes glue, a night under a clamp, and afterwards you will struggle to find the join at all. A crumbled edge on a thin leaf tip leaves nothing to join. Better not to break it, which is not much of an answer, and it is the true one.

What did I do when the tool slipped?

Lowered everything around it. Once a mark sits below the surface it cannot be sanded away, so the only move left is to bring the whole surrounding area down to meet it. My 13 millimetre number 3 did that, gently, and then the separation groove got recut with the 6 millimetre V tool as though nothing had happened.

Costs you depth you were saving. Which is exactly why the background stays high until the very end.

Why does a factory knife fight you?

Grinding is not honing, and a new blade has only been ground. Several of you ordered the number 12 after watching an earlier lesson, then wrote to say you could not get on with it, and every time the answer has been the same. Look at mine. The bevel reflects like a mirror. That takes a stone and then a strop, and until you have put that surface on it the knife will skid, tear and generally make you feel clumsy.

Do that work and the same blade becomes the tool you reach for all day. Sharpening is a whole course here for a reason, and honing is the half people skip.

Is extreme undercutting bad practice?

Some very good carvers think so, and they are not wrong about the physics. I take this further than most, my work does end up easier to break, and when people tell me that I agree with every word of it. Then I ask the only question that matters to me. Why would you break it?

Anything breaks if the wrong person picks it up. A panel with a modest undercut breaks too. Depends entirely on where the piece will live and who will handle it, and for something that hangs on a wall I will take the shadow every time.

Who will ever see the underside?

Only you, and I find that worth saying out loud. Almost everybody looks at a relief straight on. Nobody kneels and peers upward to check whether the hollow behind a lobe is clean or full of torn fibre. So the person who knows what is under there is the one holding the gouge, which makes it a question about you rather than about the viewer.

Is cross grain the same as contrary grain?

Different animals entirely, and people mix them up constantly. One means your edge is lifting fibres from underneath so they tear ahead of the tool. The other means severing them sideways, which a sharp edge does quite happily. Much of this lesson runs sideways, and none of it gives trouble.

Why put a mallet behind a V tool?

Control, oddly enough. A hand push builds pressure until the wood suddenly gives and the tool runs. Small taps deliver the same energy in measured amounts, so the edge advances a known distance and stops. My mallet here is a light one, and it goes on the number 15 at 6 millimetres, a quarter inch, when the waste underneath is dense.

How small does a V tool get?

One millimetre, and I own one. Number 16, a thirty second of an inch across the throat, and it goes into corners the 3 millimetre version cannot see. Depth is what it buys rather than width, since a narrow V can drop a long way into a tight space without touching either wall.

Why run a groove between two leaves?

To tell them apart. Where a leaf sits beside another leaf and both are the same height, the eye reads one lump. Run a narrow V between them and suddenly the eye reads two plants. Costs one pass and does more for a panel than an hour of refining surfaces.

Does flow only matter looking down?

Flow works in three dimensions, and this catches almost everybody. Your drawing was flat, so you check the curve from directly above and call it good. Then you put your eye down level with the board and the same line rises and falls like a small wave. Flow lives in three dimensions, and the third one is the one nobody checks.

Hard to photograph as well. On camera that wave is close to invisible, and standing at the bench it is barely visible, and still it bothered me enough to stop and repair it.

When is the wrong direction the right call?

When control matters more than surface. Every book says never, and mostly the books are right. Correcting that wavy line, though, I wanted the tool moving slowly with the fibres resisting it rather than running away downhill, so I deliberately worked backwards and accepted a rougher finish to tidy later.

Do you always need a bent tool?

Reach for one when something stands in the way, and otherwise leave it in the rack. Look at the left of this panel and nothing at all stands above the spot I am working. Clear ground, an open rim, and the nearest raised pipe is an inch away. A plain straight gouge goes as deep as I please. Bent shafts cost more and are harder to sharpen, so save them for the places that genuinely demand one.

Do you slice every pass, or do you push sometimes?

Slicing wherever I can manage it, and I will be honest with you, not always. On a complicated piece there are places where no angle lets the edge travel sideways, and then you push. Pushing crushes fibres instead of parting them, so the surface comes out worse, and the only thing standing between that and real damage is how sharp the tool is.

That is the whole argument for a sharp edge, put plainly. Any edged tool forgives a bad angle when it is sharp and punishes you for one when it is not.

What makes a panel weaker as you work?

You keep taking wood out from behind it. Each new hollow leaves less holding a lobe to the board, and by now some tips here have a neck no thicker than a pencil. Limewood takes this better than most species, which is half the reason ornamental carvers have used it for four hundred years, and it still has a limit.

So your hands change as the panel changes. Same tools, far less weight behind them, and rather more thought before each one goes in. Lesson eight was a much heavier day of work than this one turned out to be.

The tools, and what each one did

Tool	Where it went	Why
The 15 at 6 mm	Opens the shadow line, sometimes with a mallet behind it	Fast
The 3 mm 15	Whatever the big one left	Small enough to follow the curve of a lobe without riding up its wall
Number 3, 13 mm	Depth	Old Marples steel, and the tool that rescued my slip
Back bent 25, 6 mm	Under a rim where the shaft has nowhere to go	Reach
Number 6, 6 mm	Shaping a curl	French, and the nicest thing in my hand all day
Knife 12	Anywhere a gouge cannot enter	Useless until you hone it, then the most used thing on the bench
V tool 16, 1 mm	Corners	Depth, not width

Is one brand better than another?

Three makers appear in this lesson and I am happy with all of them. That number 6 is Auriou, French, and beautifully made. My half inch 3 is old Marples from before the name went overseas, and its Sheffield steel holds an edge the way I like. Both V tools today came from Pfeil, whose short bends carry an A after the number and confuse everybody the first time. The tools course untangles the numbering for you, sweep by sweep.

How high should the ground stay?

A sixteenth above final depth, sometimes an eighth, and always on purpose. I never bring the ground down to final depth early, because the day I dig too deep somewhere, that spare thickness is what lets me level the whole background to match instead of throwing the panel away. Insurance, and it costs nothing.

Can you pierce any part of a panel you like?

Where the design allows it and the grain will carry it, yes, and nothing stops you but nerve. Looking at this section I can see there is nothing behind it, which means the hollow could keep going until daylight appears. Whether it should is a judgement about the piece rather than about the wood.

A panel that will hang on a wall can take it. Something that gets picked up and passed round a room cannot, and I decide that before the tool goes in rather than after.

What makes this course different from a pattern book?

Pattern books show you the finished leaf. Nobody prints the slip at four minutes, the wavy line I had to chase, or the honest admission that a factory blade will fight you. Every one of those is in the video because those are the parts that decide whether your own panel works.

Where does lesson eleven leave things?

One section pierced right through, and I am pleased with it. Light comes in behind the leaf now and the whole cluster reads differently. Lesson ten named the hooking move, this one carries it round the rest of the panel, and lesson twelve takes the piercing much further.

The same argument runs through Byzantine work and through the Roman leaf, and design explains why the eye wants it.

What would I have you take away

Slow down by one notch. Not two, and not to the point of paralysis, just one. Then take the knife you have been struggling with, spend twenty minutes putting a mirror on it, and try the same pass again. Most of what people call a lack of talent turns out to be a dull edge and a hurried hand.

Take one lobe. Hone the blade first, then remove half of what you think you should, and look at the shadow before you go back in. Lesson nine explains why that shadow matters, the techniques library covers the repairs, and the rest of this course sits behind one door. Shall we carve?