Advanced Carving: Venice Room (Part 3) Workshops 26-37

A veiner is a deep U shaped gouge, marked number 11 on most shanks, and named for the veins it carves down an acanthus leaf. Roll it onto one edge and it behaves like a shallow number 3. Sit it flat on its bottom and the belly alone carves, closer to a number 9. One handle, three sweeps, and across these twelve workshops I name it nearly three times as often as the next tool down.

Does your tool chest hold gouges you have never really worked out? Have you ever laid a U gouge over on its side, just to see what shape it leaves? One tool carved most of this ceiling, and I stopped reaching past it years ago.

Too many tools on the bench slows me down, and I say so on camera more than once in here. You stand there choosing instead of carving, and the choosing eats the afternoon. Workshops 26 through 37 go the other way. Twelve workshops, one ceiling board, and one gouge I keep coming back to. I did not plan it that way. I wanted to feel what the men who first carved a room like this felt, and they did not have much.

What one veiner actually does

• Straight in, it carves a deep U. Woodcarvers named it a veiner because it carves the veins of an acanthus leaf.
• Laid over on one side, the same steel gives you a shallow 3 sweep, so a concave can start at nothing and deepen as it travels.
• Sat down on its belly it turns into a 9. Three sweeps, one handle.
• I run it between 0.5 mm and 30 mm, a hair over an inch, and I never once reached for a V tool in this room.
• The leaf itself is never measured. Three or five main divisions, the middle line pushed off centre by about a tenth, the rest by feel.
• When the wood starts to move under the edge, the tool is too big. Step down a size instead of pushing harder.

Why is a number 11 called a veiner and not a gouge?

A number 11 is not a gouge at all, whatever the rack it hangs on says. The tool is a veiner, and it was made for acanthus. Woodcarvers call it that because you work all those concaves and convexes like veins, running them down the leaf the way a vein runs down a real one. Carvers who did acanthus every single day invented the shape for exactly that job.

Names drift, though. In my shop I say pipes and eyes, and that vocabulary grew up later, in certain countries only. Not every country uses the same word for the same detail, so if you learned different names, you did not learn them wrong. The steel is the same steel.

It always comes back to the eleven.

My tools course walks the whole rack if the numbering is new to you.

How do you carve a concave that is deep at one end and almost flat at the other?

Roll the veiner while it travels. Start it straight, then tilt the tool up on its edge as you push, and go all the way through the stroke. A big number 11 at about 5/8 of an inch, 15 mm, hands you a 3 sweep on its edge and a 9 down in the belly. Everything in between comes free, because you choose the sweep with your wrist instead of picking it off the rack. Almost from nothing, from a number 3, and then in.

That gradual change is the only reason I like this tool so much. A separate gouge for every depth leaves you a stepped surface and a lot of blending afterwards. One rolled veiner leaves a smooth transition on the first pass, and a smooth transition is what an acanthus leaf is made of. It also matters for gilding. On a Byzantine style acanthus you almost never see sharp transitions, and if the piece is going to take gold leaf, a smooth transition holds it far better than a sharp one.

How it sits	What the edge does in the wood	Feels like	Where I reach for it most
Straight and square	the full U goes in at its own full depth	like a veiner	veins, pipes and the deep separations
Rolled one side	one edge deep, the other nearly flat	more like a three	long concaves that fade away to nothing
Flat on the bottom	only the bottom of the U carves at all	much like a nine	excavating the inside of an eye or a hole
The bent shank	reaches under what a straight shank cannot follow	a spoon in effect	undercutting upward against the running grain

Two shapes eat most of the veiner work on this board. One is the letter S, and if you carve an S movement the ends have to run outward, never in, because inward simply looks wrong and your eye will tell you so before you can explain it. The other is the volute, the spiral that rolls up out of a leaf and turns over on itself. Twisted volutes are my favourite detail on the whole ceiling, and I get underneath a twist like that with a 5 mm eleven.

Do you need a V tool to carve acanthus leaves?

A V tool never came out of my chest in this whole room, and I did that on purpose. I wanted to feel like those men who carved it originally, what they felt, and they had pretty much gouges and veiners. A knife and a chisel. Four things, and they did an enormous amount of work with them. Nothing stops me from using a V tool. I still could. I just do not think I need it.

Before you throw yours out, hear the honest version. My reason has nothing to do with the tool being bad, and plenty to do with what a leaf is made of. These leaves live on the soft turn from one surface into the next, and a rolled veiner hands me that turn on the first pass, which is the whole reason I keep going back to it. Try both on a Greek acanthus leaf, look at them side by side under one lamp, and decide for yourself.

What size veiner do you actually reach for?

Anything between a needle and a tool the size of a garden spade. Half a millimetre number 11 goes into the tightest eye. At the far end of the bench there is a number 7 at 80 mm, three inches across, and a number 2 at 60 mm for shaving down a whole leaf surface, and a 50 mm number 2, two inches, for chopping mass out. Between those two extremes the ones my hand finds without looking are a 12 mm eleven, call that half of an inch, and a 10 mm at three eighths.

Here is where I have to be honest with you about numbers. That 10 mm is marked three eighths, and it feels much bigger. Closer to the edge it really is three eighths, but it runs a little wider on the outside, so it works like a half inch in my hand. A few of my tools carry no marking at all, and when I name a size on those I am guessing. It is never a perfect measurement anyway. When a maker stamps half an inch on a shank, the edge is not necessarily 12.7 mm.

If I say a thing and I am not sure of it, I am lying, so I go and check.

Read the stamp and you can follow along at home. Three of the handles that turn up in the pictures on this page are stamped SWISS MADE, then 11/10, 11/7 and 11/3, and a fourth reads 30/13. The first figure is the sweep, meaning the curvature, and the second is the width in millimetres, so an 11/7 is a number 11 at 7 mm, a hair over a quarter inch. Brands are not interchangeable, and the difference sits in the profile rather than the price. A 20 mm number 11 by Ashley Iles does not have a pronounced U. Still a U, just rounder in the belly than other makers, and for a shallow rolling concave that roundness works perfectly. Numbering also shifts by country. A skew is number 1 on my bench and number 2 in England, and my number 3 would be an English number 2.

Why does an acanthus leaf never get measured?

Design laws decide the leaf, and a ruler does not. Look at old work, stone as well as wood, and whoever carved those leaves usually gave them at least three divisions. Some gave five, which means a couple more added in, and some gave eight. Three, five, eight. That sequence is a Fibonacci number. Inside each main division come the subdivisions, which are the smaller movements of the same leaf.

For the middle line I look point to point, divide that span into ten in my head, find the middle, then shift it a little so it lands about six parts out of ten. Near enough to the golden ratio that the eye stops arguing with it. The law of repetition says a detail I use here has to answer somewhere else on the board. Rhythm says the next one along gets a little smaller. Those laws are the actual content of my design course, and none of them needs a tape measure.

I could work it all out with numbers instead. Calculating the tension is an ancient tradition too, and I know how. I am not going to do it. Eyeballing is what happens instead, and no, I am not going to measure it, because it is all by feel and I am fairly sure I will land close. And I did just now, without any measurement, right on the money. Forty years of carving every day put that feel of depth in my hands, and I trust it on a leaf. Line headers I measure. Acanthus, never.

If that sounds like a contradiction, it is one worth sitting with. In the first twelve workshops of this same room I said flatly that I cannot be a millimetre out, because the framing waits on my board and nobody builds it until I am done. Both things are true. The glue up and the outside dimensions are joinery, and joinery is arithmetic. The leaf inside them is not joinery. You can watch the rest of this room and see me switch between the two ways of thinking on the same board.

What happens when the gouge is too big for the spot?

The wood moves, and you feel it in the handle before you see it on the surface. Go in too deep and you leave the near side too weak, which is exactly what I did in workshop 26. Moves. Not good. I lost a beautiful chunk of wood that I had no business losing, and I said out loud that I might glue it back. Maybe yes, maybe no. I never did glue it back, and by the next part I had also lost the movement I was chasing on that side.

The tool was the whole problem. Too big, and I knew it in my hand a second before the fibres let go. In workshop 35 I did the sensible thing instead and stepped down. The 4 mm eleven went in, and I could see the piece move. So 3 mm, and it still moved. Then 2 mm, and it was much safer. Three sizes to find one that would not stress the wall. On this board those walls run about a quarter of an inch, 6 mm, and that is all a flipping leaf leaves you.

Yes, I am wiggling while I do it, and I am fine with that.

Rushing does the rest of the damage. I broke a piece in workshop 27 and the steel was not to blame. Avoidable. It happened anyway, and I guess I was rushing too much, which is the only honest account of it I can give you. Taking time is cheaper than repair. My granddaughter was visiting while I recorded one of these parts, and you can hear her in the background, and I kept the camera running.

Why undercut a relief carving if nobody can see behind it?

Shadow. Wood carving is all about the lights and the shadow, and there are five levels of it, which is a whole subject on its own and worth studying properly. Movement and design matter, of course. Shadow is more than either. Once this ceiling is up, the person standing below reads where the light stops and not much else. So I undercut the edge of a leaf until air sits behind it.

One millimetre gives a good shadow. That is almost no carving at all, and yet your eye picks up the line straight away, especially if I turn one of the lamps off. Plenty of carvers skip it. In production work in the Middle East, and I have seen the same from carvers in South America working for churches, the holes get left open and the undercutting does not happen. Some of that has hardened into a style. Most of it is just laziness, and I say that as somebody who understands the arithmetic. They get paid the same either way, and only another carver sees the difference. They have to make a living, and they are doing a genuinely good job of the main form.

My board is not production work, so the standard is different. Every surface I carve in relief here has to hold up when somebody stands underneath it in a finished room and looks up. There is another reason I take the long way. All those slightly uneven passes, the ones a machine would never make, are the proof a human being did this and not a CNC. That is the part I will not give away.

How do you undercut where a straight gouge cannot reach?

Bend the shank. A spoon or a back bent veiner puts the edge round a corner your wrist cannot follow, and in a deep pocket it is often the only tool that fits. A 10 mm spoon number 11 will go up against the grain and take out a lot of what I do not need, and a back bent number 5 at 13 mm will do the same job closer to the surface. When everything is in the way, the back bent is the only tool I can get in there at all.

Two habits keep this from ending badly. I leave a border and I use my own finger as the fence, about 5 mm, 3/16 of an inch, back from the edge, and about 3 mm, an eighth of an inch, where the detail is fine. There are jigs sold for that. I butt a finger against the edge and use it as a reference point instead. And where two carvings meet coming from opposite directions, the grain runs two ways and the surfaces have to be blended together. I call that the marriage line, because I am marrying those two cuts.

Can rasps and sandpaper be used on a hand carved panel?

Rasps live on my bench now, and I still feel guilty every time I pick one up. I own them, so why not use them, and there I go excusing myself again. Still feels fake. It is not really fake. Just because I never used them before does not mean I cannot use them and still call the result carving. What honestly bothers me is that I like how fast the job goes. I must admit it. I actually like it.

Some of the people in my school are professional furniture makers trying to stay strictly authentic to the original work, and I think about them when I reach for the diamond rasps. Furniture makers in the past used techniques like this too, so maybe the guilt is misplaced. I would genuinely like to know how you feel about it, and not about me, because I am probably going to keep doing it. Mine are the aggressive ones. Maybe I should buy something gentler.

While we are on cheap tools, you do not need specialty steel to scrape a surface clean. A normal razor blade from Home Depot, or any lumber yard near you, will scrape a leaf perfectly well. To harden a fragile detail before it snaps, dilute ordinary yellow glue like Titebond in water and let it soak into the fibres. On a piece that will be painted there is no blotchiness to worry about.

Which habit ruins a carver's hands fastest?

Hitting the tool with your bare palm. In workshop 34 I did it on camera and immediately told everybody watching not to copy me, because in Europe they call it the carver's disease. You strike the nerves inside your palm, you damage them, and the hand closes up and will not open. Even professional carvers hit with the hand a lot. They should not. There is a pad sold for exactly this, and with the pad it is fine, but never a bare hand.

Use the mallet, and use one heavy enough to do its own work. Twelve ounces will drive a big gouge, but it tires me out much quicker, so for the heavy chopping I want 30 ounces and I let the mallet do the job. I keep the brass one off the bench for a different reason. Too much noise, and I would rather not hurt my ears. Sharpening beats force anyway, and my sharpening course makes that argument better than my shoulder does. I had green sharpening paste on my fingers in one of the workshop 33 parts.

Can a beginner carve any of this?

You will not carve the whole room, and you were not planning to. You could take one small element off this board, put it on a smaller panel, and try it out, and I would love to see what you come up with. A single leaf with three divisions and one rolled concave teaches you more than a month of watching, which is also why the bench classes fill up so fast.

I know I am stuck in one spot for a long time, but how else will you do something really nice?

If you disagree with how I do it, that is fine too. I am okay with that.

Start smaller than this ceiling. An antique style rosette a flower rosette or an acanthus over a molding uses the same rolled veiner on a board you can hold in one hand, and both sit on ordinary molding profiles you can buy anywhere. The questions I get asked most sit alongside them, and the whole lessons map shows how the courses connect. Workshops 38 through 49 carry this same board further, and the workshops before these built the acanthus head that everything here grows out of.

Leonardo da Vinci said once that a project is never done, it is just abandoned. At a certain stage you decide, and you say that is enough. I said it more than once in here, then picked the tool back up and kept going, because there was always one more concave that wanted a rolled edge. There was an easier way. I did not take it, and maybe I should have. Pick something to carve. Shall we carve?