Carving Hashemi Flowers 4

Unscrew the vice from the back of the panel and screw it to the front, and the whole reverse of a pierced carving opens up to your tools. The screw holes end up where the carving will cover them. Nobody ever sees either the holes or the work you do back there, and the piece is better for both.

Clamp a panel to the bench instead and that half of it stays out of reach forever.

Pierced work has two faces. The one people look at, and the one that decides whether the front reads as carving or as a relief with holes in it. Light comes through those openings, wraps the edges, and shows you the underside of every element whether you shaped it or not. So this panel gets turned over again and again, and below is what I do while it is round the wrong way, plus the crack I put in it by being in a hurry.

What this comes down to

• Mount so the work can turn, then remount so it can turn the other way.
• The back gets shaped, not just cleared.
• Spoon gouges and stubby handles reach what straight tools cannot.



• Settle the main form with the face toward you, before any corner comes off.
• Pressure, not sharpness, is what cracks a thin element.

Why move the vice to the front?

The screws have to live somewhere, and the front of this panel is about to be covered in carving while the back is going to be visible from every angle once the openings are cut through.

It sounds backwards and it is exactly right. Two one inch screws into a part of the face that will be buried under a flower cost nothing at all. The same two screws in the reverse would sit in the middle of a surface that somebody standing to one side will look straight at.

What it buys is access. Held by its face, the panel swings over and come at the reverse with a gouge, reach up underneath an element, and take wood off places that simply have no approach from the other side. A clamp on a bench gives you none of that, and I say this having spent years building panels the awkward way. A vice that swivels also lets you come at the piece from directly underneath, which sounds like a stunt until the first time a leaf tip needs it.

What actually happens back there?

Waste comes off, and then the surface gets shaped rather than left as a torn field of tool marks.

Bulk comes off with a number 8. A gouge with a short handle gets into the pockets between elements where a long one fouls the panel. Spoon gouges, a number 5 at eight millimetres and a number 7, do the curved undersides, because a straight tool cannot follow a surface that turns away from it.

Then I smooth it. Ridges out, one continuous surface, the same treatment as the front but faster. Nobody will ever see most of it. That is no reason to leave it rough. The technique library holds the passes, but not the discipline to use them where nobody checks. You will know what is back there. On a piece meant to outlive you, knowing counts.

Job	Tool	Why from behind
Bulk waste	Number 8, or any gouge to hand	The front approach runs into the element you are freeing
Under a curve	An 8mm spoon	A straight blade cannot follow a surface that turns under
Tight pockets	Stubby handles	A long handle hits the panel before the edge reaches the wood
Corners and stubborn spots	Knife	You see exactly where the point is, which matters when you are working blind
Last waste on a thin piece	A bent 9, or a small V	The safest approach there is to wood that has almost run out

How far do you thin it?

Until the element looks light, which is a thing you see rather than a number you reach.

A leaf standing proud of the background with a full thickness edge looks like a slab with a leaf shape cut round it. Take the underside away so the edge runs thin, and suddenly the same leaf looks as though it could move in a draught. The front has not changed at all. Only the shadow under it has. That is worth reading twice, because it is the single most surprising fact about relief carving, and it means a great deal of the impression a panel makes is decided on a surface the viewer never consciously looks at.

That thinning is the difference between a competent panel and one that stops people in a hallway, and it costs nothing except nerve and access. Grinling Gibbons built entire rooms on it, and anybody who has stood close to that work has noticed that the astonishing part is always the underside.

The crack I put in it

I pressed too hard on a thin section with the grain running the short way across it, and the wood split. My own fault, completely, and avoidable.

Glue will hold it, and I say that without much guilt. A thin crack in limewood that has not opened up takes glue, closes, and disappears under the carving that follows. So the repair is not the story. The story is that I rushed a pass I knew better than to rush, on a spot I had already identified as weak, because I wanted to be finished with that corner.

What should have happened is a change of angle. When a section starts to give, more force from the same direction is never the answer. Attack that wood from somewhere else, put the mallet down, take smaller bites. Accept that the corner costs ten minutes rather than two. That instinct is most of what separates a carver from somebody who owns carving tools.

Sharpness buys back some of the margin. Working against the grain from behind is routine on a panel like this, sometimes it is the only angle that exists, and with a properly honed edge nothing goes wrong. With a dull one the same pass needs pushing, and pushing is what cracked this piece.

What a camera cannot show you

No lens position exists for most of this. The tool is behind the work, my hand is behind the tool, and the only honest thing to say on a video is that you will have to take my word for what is happening back there.

Which is probably why the underside of pierced work is so rarely taught. It films badly, it cannot be demonstrated across a classroom, and the results only show up on the front, at an angle, under the right light. Nobody puts it in a book.

So here is the substitute for seeing it. Hold your own panel up to a window with the openings between you and the light, and look at the edges. Every place where the underside is still square will read as a dark blunt line. Every place you have thinned will glow at its edge. That test takes five seconds and it tells you more than watching me would.

Waste is the wrong word

I call it waste out of habit and then correct myself, because it is not waste. It is wood I do not need on this particular panel, which is a completely different thing.

Some of what comes off the back here is good dry limewood in pieces big enough to carve something on. It goes in the box under the bench with everything else this project has thrown off, and a fair amount of it will come back as a practice piece or as a layer glued onto some future board.

The habit of thinking that way changes how you buy timber, and it is the same thinking that let this whole carving come out of a single board seven eighths of an inch thick rather than out of a slab. Carving is subtraction, but the pile at your feet is not rubbish.

Why not remove the corner straight away?

The main form is still moving, and a corner removed is a decision you cannot revisit.

So the order is fixed. Get the shape right with the face toward you, everything still attached and strong. Rough the back so the element begins to lift. Only then take the corner off and let daylight through, and only then refine the edges from behind. Reverse any of those and you are shaping wood that is too fragile to shape.

I nearly made this hollow deeper while I was in there and stopped myself. It would have looked better for about a week, and then the grain at that point would have decided the matter. Knowing when the wood has given you everything it safely can is a judgement, not a rule, and it improves with every panel you carve.

What can a knife do back here?

Rather more than people expect. A great deal of the work on the reverse of this panel is knife work, for one reason: you can see the edge.

Behind a pierced element you are often working half blind, with the wood you want to cut hidden behind the edge and the wood you want to keep. A gouge in that position is a guess. A knife point is a thing you can watch going in, at an angle you choose, and stop exactly when you mean to.

Whole schools of carving run on almost nothing else. I would not build this panel with one, but for the last waste in an awkward corner I reach for it before I reach for anything clever.

Making the movement come from one place

While the panel is turned round, the job is more than clearing wood. It is making the whole element look as though it grows out of the scroll at its base.

That means the underside narrows toward the scroll rather than keeping its thickness. It means the surfaces tilt in at the junction. From the front you will never analyse any of this, you will simply feel that the thing has a root, and a carving whose parts have roots holds together in a way that a carving of separate good shapes never does. The reasoning behind it sits in the design course.

Cleaning the surface also lets me see. Once the back is smooth I can read the lines again, put a mark on it if I need one, and tell what is actually going on, which is impossible across a field of ridges. Half the reason for tidying as you go is not the appearance; it is visibility.

The lightest possible blow

Much of the work behind a pierced panel is done with a mallet that barely touches the tool. Not a tap you would call a blow, more a nudge that moves the edge a millimetre and stops.

People assume a mallet is for force, and on roughing work it is. Back here it does the opposite job. Hand pressure is continuous, which means when the wood lets go your hand is still travelling; a small measured blow delivers exactly the energy you chose and then nothing at all. On an element three millimetres thick that difference decides whether it survives, and it is the same argument I make about the very first passes a beginner takes.

Turning it back to the front

Every so often I unscrew the thing and turn it the right way round again, purely to look.

Work done behind changes the face in ways you cannot predict while you are back there. An edge you thinned either reads beautifully or has lost the line it needed, and there is no telling which until you look. Ten seconds of looking saves an hour, and I do it far more often than the video makes it appear. The same check run from the side, with your eye down at bench level, is how you catch a form that has quietly gone flat, and the lesson two back is built around that habit.

Then back over again. This panel gets turned perhaps thirty times before it is finished, and the vice that makes that cheap is worth more to the result than any individual gouge in the rack. Everything in this project assumes you can do it.

The next lesson goes back to the front and takes on the woven basket, and the one before shaped the scroll this element grows from. All of it sits behind the door.

Shall we carve?