Carving Roman Acanthus 10

A dull tool is the real reason a carving fights you, not the wood under it. My teacher said it plainly when I complained about a board. There is no such thing as bad wood, only tools that are not sharp. Lime, basswood, cherry and walnut all behave once the edge does.

Ever blamed a board for tearing when the truth was sitting in your hand? Bought softer wood hoping it would carve easier, and found it went dull on you just as fast? This workshop takes the leaf underneath itself, and every pass of it depends on steel that will slice rather than crush. So we will talk about that, and about what an acanthus is actually doing when one leaf disappears behind another.

What actually decides how this stage goes

• Sharp steel. The whole secret of a deep excavation sits there, and no second trick exists.
• Slice while undercutting, never push.
• Keep some meat below the leaf until the shape is settled, or it turns fragile before you are ready.
• A half round edge means sweep 9. Anything shallower is an 8, whatever the shank says.
• Acanthus is interweaving. One leaf slips under the next and carries on out the far side.
• Pencil marks make the wood look dirty, so let the tools do your marking.

Why do my carving tools go dull in soft wood?

Hardly at all, which surprises people. People say basswood is kind to an edge and your tools will hold an edge in it, and my bench says otherwise. Soft it certainly is. My gouges still go dull in it, sometimes very fast.

So I check the edge constantly while I work, feeling for the wire edge that rolls over when steel has had enough. Finding one, I strop it, buff it, or take it back to the stone. That happens several times in a working day, not once a week.

And here is the line my own teacher gave me, which I have never improved on. I was complaining about a piece of wood that would not carve nicely, and he listened, and then he told me the fault was never in the wood. Only in dull tools. Nowhere else, ever.

Certain species really are close to impossible, and I will not pretend otherwise. But if the board in front of you is walnut, cherry, basswood or lime, and it is fighting you, the trouble is not the tree. Go and sharpen something.

How do you tell a number 8 gouge from a number 9?

Look at the curve and ask whether it is a true half circle. A 9 is a genuine half round, and an 8 stops a little short of one. Sight along it end on.

Worth knowing, because plenty of old tools carry no legible number at all. One of mine is unmarked and I call it an 8, though it might honestly be a 9. The curve on it does not quite close the half, so 8 it stays in my head.

The label matters far less once you can read the shape. What matters is which curve drops into the hollow you are carving, and your eye learns that faster than any catalogue teaches it.

Why slice when you are already underneath the leaf?

Crushing is the alternative. Watch the tool rather than the wood on this pass. The blade travels forward and rotates a few degrees at the same time, so the edge shears sideways as it travels.

Undercutting tempts you into pushing, because you cannot see where the blade is going and force feels like control. Force is the opposite of control here. I keep slicing right through the undercut, and when I hit a section I genuinely cannot see, I go by feel and guess what is happening under there.

The goal of the whole pass is one continuous sweep running below the carving, coming out clean on the far side. Getting all the way through is a good moment. From there the movement reads as one gesture rather than as a row of separate bites.

What does interweaving mean on an acanthus leaf?

One section passes beneath its neighbour and reappears beyond it, exactly as a woven thing does. Look at this panel and you will see the lower leaf vanish under the section above it and continue out the other side, and the leaf above does the same trick against a third.

Woven movement is the whole idea of acanthus. Strip it out and you have rows of grooves. Build it in and the eye keeps travelling around the panel looking for where each part went, which is why a Roman frieze holds attention the way it does.

Carving it costs you the undercut. The leaf has to genuinely go under, and not just appear to, because a shallow pretence collapses the moment the light moves. Paying that price safely is exactly why the order of operations exists.

How thin can a carved leaf safely go?

Mine go close to paper at the edges, and I accept what that costs. Someone once called the result airy, and the word stuck with me. Airy. Light like air.

This particular panel lets me push further than furniture would. A chair rail gets handled, leaned on, moved by people who are not thinking about your undercut. My panel has a background behind it, so I can frame it, hang it, stain it in shades until it looks antique, and nobody will ever grip it.

Decorative work earns the extreme. Something built to be used does not. Decide which one you are carving before you start thinning the edges, because that decision governs every pass afterwards.

Control matters more the thinner it gets. Mistakes on a fragile leaf mostly cannot be repaired, so the feel in your hands has to be doing the work your eyes cannot.

One thing that is not fussy here is the tool number. A sweep 5 does this undercutting and a 6 does it equally well, and the only real requirement is that whatever you pick is not too wide for the space. Width is what limits you at this stage, never the exact curve, and a carver with three small gouges is not short of anything.

The tool	The size I usually reach for	What it does	Can you get by without it
Number 5	A quarter inch, which is six millimetres	Undercutting, upside down	No, you will want one of these
A cheap carving knife	Any size	Refining the edge, where a flexible blade beats rigid	Also no
Number 8	Three thirty seconds of an inch	Deepening the eye	No, the eye needs a tool this small
Back bend, sweep 5	3 mm	Reaching in where a straight handle fouls the leaf above it	Yes, you can
V tool at 45 degrees	Three millimetres	Cleaning a deep cut	Yes, though it leaves the cleanest cut here
Number 1, double bevel	Quite small	Knife work, but with a chisel	Yes, a good knife covers most of this job

Why does the camera never show the undercut properly?

Deep shade is the point of the whole cut, and shade photographs as a black smear. I say so out loud in this workshop more than once, that you probably cannot see what my blade is doing, and I promise to turn the panel sideways later once the work is finished so the shape reads.

That frustration is worth sitting with rather than skipping past. A hollow you can photograph is a hollow that is too shallow to throw real shade. The deeper it goes, the blacker it reads to a standing viewer and the less a lens can tell you about it.

So I work partly blind and I am comfortable there. My fingers report the wall thickness, and after enough panels the picture in your head is close enough to keep working from. Beginners find that alarming. That passes.

A back bend earns its keep precisely here. Its handle lifts up and away from the surface while the edge stays down in the hollow, so nothing fouls the leaf standing above. Mine is stamped 25 over 3, a back bent sweep 5 at three millimetres, and it goes as deep as I care to take it.

Straight tools reach a point where the handle simply collides with the carving. You feel it happen. Reaching for a bent tool at that moment is not indulgence, it is the only way the blade gets where the design wants it. A stropped edge on that bent tool matters twice as much, because you cannot see the tearing until you turn the piece over.

Can you fill a mistake in a carving with glue and sawdust?

People ask me this often, and my own answer is that I never do it on a carving. Old masters certainly did. The method is real and it works.

What they used was hide glue, mixed with sawdust into a putty, and the choice of glue is the important half. Hide glue still takes a stain. Modern yellow glue does not, so a filled spot made with yellow glue sits there pale and obvious the moment you colour the piece.

Cracks disappear under it. Mistakes disappear under it. Knowing that, I would still rather carve the repair out than fill it, which is a preference and not a rule, and you are free to disagree with me.

Should you draw on the wood with a pencil?

As little as you can manage. I use a pencil on camera to show you where a line is going, and I would not normally bother. Graphite spreads. Lay down enough of it and the surface goes grey and grubby looking.

Cleaning it off is possible and I am not worried about this panel. Avoiding it altogether is simply less work. My preference is to mark with the tool itself, a shallow stop cut where the boundary belongs, because that mark cannot smudge and it is already the first pass of the real carving.

Boundaries matter here more than usual. This lobe wants an outline like the bow of a boat, and once that shape is in my head I do not need it on the wood. Drifting a little from the original drawing is fine, incidentally. Nobody is holding your panel up against it.

How do you carve a concave cut as long as possible?

Run it between two boundaries in one continuous movement, and choose a gouge narrow enough to stay inside them. Mine for this is an eighth of an inch. Small, and it travels the whole length rather than stopping halfway.

Length is the thing I chase, not depth. A short concave reads as a scoop taken out of a surface. A long one reads as the shape of the leaf itself, and the difference between those two is most of what separates a carving that flows from one that does not.

Shaping the ends is where a gouge beats a knife. Find the sweep in your rack that matches the profile you drew, stand it on the line, and push straight down. Doing that on both sides with the same tool guarantees the two ends match, and no amount of careful knife work will match them as reliably.

Mine here is a number 6 at three quarters of an inch, and yours may want something else entirely because your design will be a little different from mine. Check the profile before you pick the tool.

Why reach for a double bevel number 1?

Reach and control together. A number 1 sharpened on both faces behaves like a knife while still being a chisel, and the small one lives in my hand for a good part of this stage.

Some carvers call a tool like that a lazy hand tool, or a lady's carving tool, and I do not agree with them at all. Small tools reach places a big one cannot. Calling that laziness misses what the tool is actually for.

Careful with the back of any gouge while you work, by the way. Rolling a tool over to reach underneath presses its underside into the surface behind, and basswood bruises. Mine will be recarved later so I let it go, and yours might not be.

Would you rather guess what is happening under a leaf you cannot see, or watch somebody do it slowly with the camera right there? Shall we carve?

This workshop belongs to the Roman acanthus series, and tuition opens that along with everything else in the library. Prefer my hands on your work? We teach in person as well, and this is where a beginner begins. The Greek leaf and the Byzantine one are carved on the same principles, and the next workshop carries this leaf further under.