Carving Hashemi Flowers 43

A peony. Not the rose, which surprises nearly everybody who asks me. I have carved plenty of roses and I love carving them. Peonies are worse. Its rings face opposite directions, the high point sits nowhere near the middle, and petal after petal you are still shaping them one at a time.

Go and look at a peony in a garden for a minute. Can you find the middle of it? Can you tell which petal lies on top of which?

Neither can I. Which is the whole problem, and why I keep coming back to this flower. Lesson 43 of the Hashemi flowers panel begins that peony: an oak block, two screws, a number seven gouge, and a lump of basswood that has to become a ball before it can become anything at all.

What the hour actually covers

• Harder than a rose, and petal count has almost nothing to do with it.
• Get the lump round first. You draw petals on a ball, never on a square corner.
• The high point sits off to one side, and every ring answers to where it lands.
• Two screws into an oak block, one small plate, and the vise lets you attack from anywhere.
• Leave the mallet alone. Screws work loose under it and the whole thing starts to shake.
• Not one petal the same size as the petal beside it.
• Every separation here is preliminary. The deep work comes later.

Which flower is the hardest to carve in wood?

The peony, by a distance. On camera in this lesson I put it plainly, and I meant it: a lot more complicated than the rose.

People expect the opposite. A rose looks tighter, more folded, more of a puzzle from the outside. But a rose resolves. Its petals wrap one centre and they all agree about where that centre is. Nothing in a peony agrees with itself anywhere. The outer ring curls down and away from you while the rings above it climb, so the flower is arguing in two directions at once, and your gouge has to take a side at every single petal.

Then there is the undercutting, which is where the hours go. Concaves and convexes describes the shapes. Nobody warns you how many of them one peony needs.

Why does the flower start as a ball?

My goal in this lesson is one shape and one shape only: a semi-perfect ball. Not perfect. Semi. That lump is the base for all those petals. Until it exists you have nothing to draw on, because a petal drawn across a square corner lies to you about its own length. I could take the blank to the band saw and knock the corners off on an angle first, and you can if you want to. I do not have to, and I would rather feel it come round under the tool.

Same gouge throughout the roughing, a number seven. A flower that starts as a donut covers the outer ring of this same peony, which is the shape underneath everything here.

Where does the centre of a carved flower sit?

Off to one side.

Mine sits well away from the middle, and the moment you accept that, the rings tell you which way to run.

This is not a sphere and it should not be. Because the high point lands where it does, one side of the flower has a long sweep from the wall down to the point, and the other has a short one. So that side comes out rounder and this one takes a sharper fall. It also fixes the arithmetic for you: on the short side there is simply less room, which means fewer petals fit, and no amount of wishing changes it. How many petals a flower should have takes the counting further.

Does a smaller gouge do a better job?

Sometimes, and here it does. I start with three quarters of an inch, feel too much resistance, and drop straight to five eighths. That surprises people who think a big tool is a fast tool. On a ball this size the wide sweep fights the curve everywhere except one narrow band. Across end grain it fights worse. A smaller tool has less resistance and, honestly, does the better job. Later in the same hour I go down again, to a ten millimetre number seven, for exactly the same reason. Carving detail in end grain goes into what that grain actually does to a cut.

Should a mallet touch a screw mounted blank?

Leave it on the bench here. Swinging one is possible, and you would pay for it.

The blank is held by a couple of screws into a small oak block, an inch and three quarters square, carrying a two inch plate below it for the vise. I say out loud that it is still kind of wiggling, and it is. Hammering a mount like that creates shakiness, and the screws work looser under every blow. So I use hand pressure and I take my time. Do not force it, even with two screws in there. Nothing about this stage rewards speed. Whether carving is about speed at all answers that one properly.

Which way do the petals grow?

Both ways at once.

The first ring grows from inside and curls downhill. Most of the petals above it grow uphill. If only one ring went down and everything else went up, the flower would read as unnatural, so a few areas further round drop downhill as well, and I excavate behind them to let them. Near the bottom there are lower petals that also grow from inside out, and forgetting those is a big mistake. Their arc runs maybe half the height of a high one.

What do you mark the divisions with?

A V tool, if you can stand to. I use a marker in this lesson because the camera cannot see a pencil line, and I tell you not to copy me. Pencil is better. Graphite is not really the answer either, because after enough handling the piece becomes dirty, and this flower never sees sandpaper. What you can use instead is a V tool as the marking tool. Make the divisions as cuts and they cannot smudge, cannot transfer to your thumb, and cannot rub out when you clean up. They are preliminary anyway. Any V tool will do, because none of it is the final cut. When cleaning rubs out your centre line is the other half of this argument.

Should carved petals be the same size?

Never. Some bigger, some smaller, and the drawing has to say so before the gouge does. Make sure you are not creating every petal at one size. Variation is the point, and the edges want waviness from the first mark rather than a true arc. I sometimes cannot even call them arcs, because half of them do not look like arcs at all. Fixing the flow later is possible. Get the waviness in on the first pass, though, and you save yourself the repair. Closer to the centre the petals crowd, so more of them appear there, and when a space comes out too big I subdivide it on the spot. Telling whether a carved line flows properly is worth reading right beside this one.

How far down do the first separation cuts go?

Shallow.

Deep enough to see the divisions, and no further than that.

Nothing here goes too deep, and depth at this point would be a big mistake. The number sixteen V tool makes the separations, then number nine at six millimetres opens the areas about to become downward petals, and it is a quarter inch purely because of the end grain. If a band saw mark from the original blank still shows, I do not worry about it at all. Once the petals get carved, it disappears.

Stage by stage on one peony blank

When does a slip stop being cheap?

The moment shaping begins. Nothing before that point costs you anything.

You can watch one happen in the video. The tool gets away from me and goes through a division, and I say straight away that it is absolutely okay right now. Later on the same slip is a big mistake, an absolute no. None of which means I am relaxed about mistakes. It is that everything here is still oversize, so the wood that carries the error is wood I have not committed to yet. What to do when you make a mistake carving deals with the ones that land after that line.

Why do I reach for a skew gouge here?

It slices without being asked.

The whole reason sits in that one sentence, and on end grain it matters more than anywhere else.

A slicing action normally means carving while you move the tool sideways, left or right, so the edge shears the fibres instead of pushing them. A skew already sits at an angle. Push it straight and it creates that slicing on its own, no sideways travel needed. Mine is a number seven skew. If you do not own one, a knife does the same job here and a knife is quick; I like a number twelve for it. Pfeil, Ashley Iles and Henry Taylor all make skews in this range.

Which petal goes over which?

You decide.

One pair at a time, though one rule settles most of it for you before you get there.

The petals grow from inside out, so the outer part always sits above the inner part. Between two neighbours on the same ring, though, nothing is settled. I take one this way and its neighbour the opposite way, and the flower gains movement from the disagreement. The knife takes each layer down, and down, and down again. A natural split in the wood turned up inside mine, and rather than fight it I put a petal separation exactly there and blended it in.

How deep is deep enough?

Deeper than looks sensible, and this is still not the final excavation. Do not be afraid to take it down here, because the real excavation comes after. The V tool is step number one and it goes as deep as it will go, all the way round. The deeper you go, the more shadow the flower throws, and shadow is what makes a carved peony read from across a room. A flat one reads as a badge. Carving the back of a pierced panel makes the same argument about light from the other side of the board.

How long does one peony take?

Far longer than the drawing suggests.

Every single petal on it takes a turn of its own before the flower is done.

The same sentence comes back more than any other in this lesson, and I mean it literally. I am going to work on every petal separately. Each one is designed on its own too. Nothing poetic in that; the thing is simply how the schedule works out. Each petal is a small decision about direction, height, waviness and what sits underneath, and none of them can be batched. The complication lives right there, and it is exactly why I love this flower. Who decides how finished a commission has to be is the business end of the same question.

Is a peony worth starting as a beginner?

Carve a leaf properly first, and then the answer is yes. Never held a gouge at all? Start on something flatter and come back to this one.

Selling you a flower you are not ready for is not my job. This one asks you to hold a shape in your head that you cannot see all of at once, and that skill grows out of simpler work. The ball stage forgives almost everything, which helps. Carved in lime or basswood, with the blank screwed to a scrap of oak and turned in the vise, you can be wrong about the whole layout twice and still end up with a flower. Look at the Baroque and Venetian work in the V and A sculpture collection and count how few of those flowers are symmetrical. None of them were carved by somebody in a hurry.

What this lesson leaves you with

A lumpy ball covered in shallow V cuts that does not look like much yet. Twice in the video I admit as much, because it is true and pretending would be worse.

Then it turns. Carving the flower as a separate blank explains why this peony is a socketed piece rather than part of the panel, and whether to wiggle a gouge as it cuts covers the hand technique you will use on every one of them.

Shall we carve?