Carving Roman Acanthus 14

The smallest tool on my bench measures half of one millimetre and it is not a gouge at all. It is a veiner, a U shape narrower than a pencil lead, and its whole job is digging under a finished edge so the shade underneath turns black. Nothing else reaches in there.

Ever carved a detail correctly and found it still looked like it was sitting on the surface rather than growing out of it? Wondered how anybody gets a shadow under something a quarter of an inch across? The answer is smaller than you think and slower than you want.

Key takeaways

• A veiner under one millimetre wide does most of the shadow work on this leaf.
• Undercutting beats going deeper, every time, for the same amount of dark.
• Mark with a knife. Pencil turns a production piece filthy.
• Some pipes get one plain return instead of three. Not everything needs subdividing.
• Press and it breaks. Wiggle the tool instead and it walks in.
• I overdo it too, and anyone who has watched me work will tell you so.

How small does a carving tool actually go?

Below a millimetre, and mine is about half that. Calling it a gouge is wrong, since the profile is a U and not a sweep, which makes it a veiner.

What it does is dig underneath. The return on this pipe is already carved and shaped, and now I want it undercut, so the veiner goes in beneath the finished edge and takes wood out from under it where nobody will ever see the blade go.

Watch the shadow arrive while that happens. The form on top has not changed at all. The space beneath it changed, and suddenly the detail reads as something lifted off the leaf instead of scratched into it.

A number 3 comes back in for the approach from the opposite side. Two directions on every one of these, because the grain runs one way and only one of those directions shears cleanly.

A sixteenth recuts the middle deeper after that, and the smallest veiner follows it inside. A hollow within a hollow within a hollow. Each is a band of dark nested in the last, and the eye adds them up into depth the wood does not physically have.

Why mark with a knife instead of a pencil?

Graphite does not come off. Every pencil line you draw has to be carved away later on, and during production work the piece turns dirty well before it turns finished.

Right now I am cleaning pencil marks with a number 3 and I put them there myself, on purpose, so the camera could follow what I was doing. On my own bench with nobody watching, those marks never go on the wood.

Use a knife for marking instead. Your mark is then a cut in the wood, which the first gouge pass takes off completely, leaving nothing behind to tidy. The piece stays clean the whole way through.

It also reads better. A pencil line has width and a knife line has none, so when you need a mark accurate to a tenth of a millimetre the knife is the only honest instrument on the bench.

Beside each pipe a sixteenth excavates a little deeper. Not so deep that the pipe vanishes, because you still have to be able to detect it as a pipe, and a number 3 afterwards softens what the small one left behind.

How do you carve without breaking the leaf?

Stop pressing and start wiggling. Force is what breaks ornament at this size, and the moment you apply real pressure to a piece of wood half a millimetre thick you have already lost it.

My veiner goes in with a slight side to side movement instead of a shove. That wiggle lets the edge find its way. Push the same tool straight and it stops dead or it snaps something.

I go quiet here and students notice. Concentration is part of it, though not the whole reason I stop talking, because I am half afraid that breathing on the thing will break it.

A small knife handles what the veiner cannot. Mine is another Peter Benson tool from the Ashley Iles collection, and between the knife and the micro gouges there is almost no shape you cannot make.

One limit exists and it is not the tool. Force it and you will overdo it, and I do that all the time. Believe me, I am guilty of overdoing it as often as anybody reading this.

What is happening	Which tool is actually in my hand for it	How deep it goes	The thing that goes wrong if you get impatient about it here
The undercut	A veiner, and the half millimetre one	Just under the finished edge	Pressing, since that alone will ruin ornament of this size
Recutting the middle	A gouge at one sixteenth of an inch	Deeper than the first pass, so a second line of shade nests inside it	Making it a groove
The long concave running the whole length of the leaf	Number 9	An eighth of an inch down	Running into the rim you already undercut, since that is thin and fragile
The single return	A V tool line, about three thirty seconds deep	Quarter inch of length	Going too far in too early, before the shape underneath it exists yet
The pipe	Just a number 3, light passes and nothing else	Rounding it right over	Leaving it faceted, which betrays every single stop cut underneath it

When does a pipe not get subdivided?

When the space runs out. Earlier returns on this leaf were divided in three and hollowed part by part, and these ones get a plain single return with no subdivision at all.

About a quarter inch of length is enough for the simple version. Draw the line, then a small V tool takes the preliminary work, mine being a number 15 at three millimetres, though any V tool does the same job.

That preliminary goes 3/32 deep, measured from the top of the return down. Then a number 3 lowers the wood on both sides of it, carefully, and the shape starts to stand up off the surface.

Setting the preliminary form after that takes a number 8, an eighth wide, which is the same tool used for the eyes further up the leaf. Reusing a tool across different elements is not laziness. Matching curves are what makes a panel look like one hand made it.

Then it gets smaller again, down to 3/32 or below, to dig the inside of the eye. Or the eye of the acanthus leaf, rather. Calling it mine is a habit I catch myself in, and the leaf is older than any of us.

How deep is the concave that runs to the edge?

An eighth deep, and that is measured rather than guessed. The whole leaf takes one long hollow running from the centre all the way out, which is a different job from the small hollows inside the returns.

My tool for it is a number 9 at ten millimetres, considerably bigger than anything used so far in this workshop. Big hollows want big sweeps, otherwise the surface comes out lumpy where each small pass ended.

Careful at the outer end though. That edge is already undercut from the last workshop, which leaves it thin, and running a ten millimetre gouge into thin wood is how a morning gets wasted.

It survives if you do hit it. Losing a corner there is not the end of anything, only it looks much cleaner and nicer when you stop short on purpose, so I stop short on purpose.

Both sides then get the identical treatment. Same depth, same tool, same distance from the edge, because a relief leaf that is symmetrical by design has to be symmetrical in the hollows as well as the outline.

Softening the edges of the return comes last in that sequence. Sharp arrises catch the light in a way that looks unfinished rather than crisp, so a few passes take the hardness off them, and a thin edge survives handling better once it is rounded.

Waste comes out of the eye carefully, a flake at a time, and the sixteenth refines both sides again afterwards.

What do you do when the surface goes rough?

Very little, honestly. Roughness here is normal, and panicking about it is what makes people sand a piece before it has finished being carved.

Take your time and recut the passage. A cut that came out poorly can be made again, and the second attempt is usually better because you now know where the fibre wants to go.

Sharpness is probably the whole key to it. Rough surfaces usually mean a dull edge rather than a bad technique, and five minutes on a strop fixes more carving problems than an hour of trying harder.

Some areas stay awkward whatever you do. This corner is picky, as I called it at the bench, which does not mean impossible. It means you approach from both sides, take less each time, and let the wood come out in flakes.

Patience is the actual instruction and everybody hates hearing it. There is no tool that makes a fragile corner strong, and the panel does not care how long you have been carving.

Can you judge two halves by eye alone?

Put your face directly over the panel and look straight down at it. An angled view lies about symmetry, and a leaf will pass that inspection while failing a square one.

My whole check is that. Look down, compare the two halves, repeat the movement on whichever one is behind, and look down again. Eyeballing sounds unserious until you try it on a curved surface where no rule will sit flat.

Either a number 3 or a plain knife handles the adjustment. Neither is better. Whichever is in your hand when you spot the difference is the correct one, and reaching for a specific tool you have to go and find is how a small correction turns into a long one.

Afterwards a number 7 cleans the whole area up. Then it looks right, and looking right from straight overhead is the only test this symmetry has to pass.

Sometimes the bigger tool turns out to fit after all. I reached for something small in this corner, found it slow, tried one size up and it went in perfectly, which happens more often than my tool habits would suggest.

Last of all a knife lowers the two remaining sections by a fraction, a sixteenth comes in from the sides, and the area is done. Not finished, since nothing on this panel is finished yet. Done for today.

Why does he keep going on about shadow?

Shadow is the only thing a viewer actually sees. Wood is one colour. A carved panel has no paint and no contrast of its own, so every bit of drawing in it is done by light and dark.

Maybe I do say too much about shadows. It comes up in nearly every workshop and I know it does. The reason is that a student who understands shade stops asking how deep to go and starts asking where the light is coming from.

The illusion we are building is that this return comes from inside the leaf and turns outward, and a sixteenth working its sides is what sells that. Go under it with the half millimetre veiner and the illusion stops being an illusion.

Jewellery is the word that keeps occurring to me at this stage. These forms are small enough that a silversmith would recognise the scale, and fragile enough that you can break one by leaning on the board.

Then a number 7 takes out the last standing ridge, a number 3 rounds the pipe properly, and a small ornament that took two hours starts to look as though it happened by itself. Basswood held every one of these details, incidentally, which surprises people.

A pipe finishes round instead of faceted, and round is what a Roman carver would have left, and rounding it is the last thing I do here. Faceting betrays every stop cut you made along the way.

Would you rather watch that tiny veiner go under an edge in real time than read about it? Shall we carve?

This workshop sits inside the Roman acanthus series, and tuition opens it with everything else. Workshop thirteen set the sizes these returns follow, sharpening is its own course for a reason, and the tools course covers what a veiner is before you buy one. The Greek leaf never goes this small. Want me beside you? We teach in person, and a beginner starts here.