Carving Hashemi Flowers 34

Every vein runs to the center line, and you carve only a handful. On this peony leaf a small number 7 went in shallow, in a handful of spots rather than everywhere, and the center line it aimed at sat closer to one edge of the leaf than to the middle of it.

Ever carved a leaf that still looked flat when you put the tool down? Did you cut every vein you could count in the photo you were working from? That is usually the reason. Carve every vein you can count and the thing reads like a diagram. Four or five, and it reads like a leaf.

Lesson 34 of the Hashemi flowers panel leaves the flowers alone for a while and builds a leaf beside one of them. That flower is going to be a peony, so the leafage has to belong to a peony too, and in one sitting the leaf gets shaped, ridged and veined, plus one hole I did not plan on. Lesson 31 added a leaf the drawing never asked for. This one shapes it.

What one leaf asks of you

• Vein direction, which is never outward and never parallel.
• How few you actually carve, and why the right number will feel wrong to you at first.
• Finding the spine when the leaf is not symmetrical.
• A ridge, and the shadow it exists for.
• One half hollow and the other half rounded over, and the reason is not decoration.
• Going clean through the back.
• The flip at the tip, which takes ten seconds and changes how the whole leaf sits on the panel.

Which way should the veins run on a carved leaf?

Toward the center line. All of them, every time, with no exceptions I can think of after forty years at a bench. Send one off to the rim instead, or lay two parallel like railway track, and you break the one thing the eye already knew about leaves before it ever looked at your panel.

Watch where the small 7 lands in this lesson and you will see the same gesture over and again: start out near the rim, finish near the spine. The gouge is doing what the plant did.

Direction is also a grain decision, and this is where a leaf punishes you. Half those passes run with the grain and half run into it, because the leaf turns and the tree did not. You take the good half normally, then turn the panel, take the bad half from the other end, and accept that a gouge is only as forgiving as its edge. Why the V tool goes in first on this panel is the same argument one step earlier.

How many veins does one leaf need?

Fewer than the leaf has. I carve a few spots, not everywhere, and then I stop while it still looks unfinished to me, because it does not look unfinished to anybody else.

There is a reason beyond taste. Each one is a shallow trench, and a trench thins a leaf that is already thin. Carve the full set and you have carved a comb. Leave gaps and the wood between them still has some strength, which matters a great deal about four minutes later when you start working the back.

One gets carved deeper than its neighbours. Just one. It gives the eye somewhere to land, and it stops the set reading as a stamp.

Where does the center line actually sit?

Closer to one edge, usually. On the leaf in this lesson I said so out loud, hunting for it on camera, because a leaf that curls or turns does not hand you a midline down the geometric middle. You find it by eye, on the leaf in front of you, after the form is shaped and before a single vein goes in.

An acanthus leaf handles its middle line differently, since that one is a designed ornament with rules behind it. A peony leaf is a plant. Find its spine where the plant would have put it, then aim everything else at that line.

Why does a ridge come before any vein?

For the shadow. That is the whole reason, and I say so on camera in as many words.

Before the veins there is a ridge running the length of the leaf, and the two halves either side of it are not the same. One is hollow, one is rounded. I carved the first side one way, then said the opposite direction for the second, got concave and convex backwards mid sentence, and apologised to the camera for the confusion. The wood did not mind. The ridge started with a small 7 and finished with a slightly bigger one. Once it is there, the light has something to break over.

The join between those two halves wants attention afterwards. Two sweeps meeting at a line leave a step you can feel with a thumbnail, and on a leaf that step will catch light as a bright wire and ruin the whole soft turn you were after. Blending the ridges a gouge leaves behind is a whole skill, and on a leaf this size it is thirty seconds with the 4.

Which gouges carved this leaf?

Six, and only a single specialist among them.

Does the grain matter while you are still finding the form?

The grain can wait. I carved this leaf against it for the first several minutes and said plainly that this did not worry me, because I was making a form, not a finish. What I needed at that point was a clean surface I could read.

The grain collects its debt later, and it always collects. When the shape is settled you come back, turn the tool round, and take the torn spots off with the fibres instead of into them. Doing that first, on a shape you have not decided yet, is work you will carve away.

Why clear the chips before you decide anything?

You cannot judge a shape you cannot see. Halfway through the veining I stop, brush the whole leaf clear, and only then look at what I have got. Chips lie in a trench and fill it. Fill a trench three quarters with waste and it looks shallow, so you deepen it, and the next morning it is a gouge track across your leaf.

It costs ten seconds and it has saved me more leaves than any tool on the rack. I like the movement on the left side of this one, by the way, and I said so on camera for no reason at all. Keeping a carving clean while you work gets a lesson of its own here, which tells you how much of the craft it really is.

What does a subdivision mean on a leaf?

A lobe. Those small bays and points around the edge are what make a peony leaf a peony leaf instead of a green oval, and they go in after the veins, using that gouge and a knife.

Keep them uneven. Lobes marching along at matching intervals look machined, and the plant never did that. Vary the depth, vary the spacing, let one run long. The rule that no line in a carved leaf should end at a right angle applies here as hard as it does on an acanthus.

What happens when a leaf gets too thin?

You go through it. I did, right at the end of the first part, reaching underneath with the ivy tool, and the word out of my mouth was just "oh".

A leaf that stands proud of a panel is a cantilever. Every pass from the front lowers the top, every pass underneath raises the floor, and the two meet somewhere you cannot see. I keep an eye on it and I still get caught. How thin a carved leaf can go is its own lesson on this panel, and the honest answer there is the same as the honest answer here.

Is the flip worth the risk?

It costs less than anything else in the lesson.

Risk is the right word, though. By the time the flip goes in, the tip is the thinnest wood on the panel, it is unsupported on three sides, and you are asking it to bend without a mallet anywhere near it. Hand pressure only. One pass, watch the fibres, and if the tool starts to lift rather than slice, stop and strop before you try again.

A flip is a short turn at the very end of the leaf, made with the smallest gouge on the bench, that lifts the tip away from the panel so it stops lying there like a sticker. Tiny detail. Huge difference. Those small details are what create the beauty in this kind of work, and they take seconds, and they are the first thing to break, which is why the flip goes in after the veins rather than before them.

Do the leaves have to match the flower?

They do if you want anyone to believe the panel. The flower I am building here is going to read as a peony, so the leafage in the spaces around it has to be peony leafage, and not a generic three lobed leaf borrowed from a pattern book.

Nobody in your family will name the species. They will still know when it is wrong, the same way you know a face is wrong without being able to say which feature moved. A peony has its own leaf and its own habit, and ten minutes looking at one beats an hour of guessing at the bench.

How sharp does a tool have to be for vein work?

Really, really sharp. I say it a million times in these lessons and I will say it again. Each pass crosses half a dozen grain directions, in wood about the thickness of a coin. A dull edge crushes that. A sharp one slices it.

I learned this where nobody would choose to learn it. In prison I carved furniture with a 10 mm knife I made and a tiny gouge made out of a nail, and those two had to be sharp because there was nothing else. Of the three things I teach, sharpening comes second, after design and before carving, and it is the one that takes years. Nobody should treat it as a chore between carving sessions. It is the carving.

What the last part of the lesson is for

Bringing the leaf into the panel, so it belongs there instead of sitting on top.

A 5 takes the semi final form, a 9 drops one whole side downhill, and then the rim gets undercut just enough to separate the leaf from whatever is behind it. That last move buys a shadow line all the way round, and a shadow line is what makes a flat board read as depth. The same idea drives making a carved leaf catch the light, and it is why background leaves get lowered before anything else on this panel.

Where this leaves the panel

One peony leaf, veined, ridged, flipped at the tip, holed once and mended, sitting beside a flower that is still only rings. There are 48 more lessons behind and ahead of this one.

The rest of this panel and all 49 lessons sit behind tuition at the school. It is carved in basswood, the American lime that every panel course here uses, with a mixed rack of Ashley Iles, Pfeil and Henry Taylor. If you want to see where all of this is going, the sculpture rooms at the V and A hold leaves carved by men who never owned a machine, and Grinling Gibbons is the one whose leaves you will remember.

Shall we carve?