Design principles for wood carving 3

Whatever sits around your central element decides how big that element reads. On a bare sheet it has none. Set one small mark next to it and the very same outline turns enormous, without you touching it. Put something larger behind and it shrinks back into a detail, without one line inside it changing.

So I draw a boat and ask how long it is. Somebody says twenty five feet. Sixteen, says another man. Both answers are guesses, and both are wrong, because nothing on that board says anything about size yet.

This lesson is three rules working together. Which part of a panel dominates and whether it grows or falls. What surrounds the main idea and how that sets the scale. And a counting sequence that decides how many petals a flower has, whether anybody carved it or not.

What you settle before the first line goes on the wood

• Scale is relative, and a shape on its own tells a viewer nothing whatever about how large it stands.
• A small companion makes a big shape enormous, and reversing the trick buries that same shape in somebody else's story.
• Upper half or lower half, one has to rule.
• The main movement climbs while the second falls, each on its own diagonal.
• Never repeat a size. Same-size leaves and flowers on one panel kill it.
• Petal counts, seed spirals and star fields all land on the same short list of numbers.

How can the same drawing be two different sizes?

Your eye is given nothing to measure against, so it falls back on whatever boats you happen to have stood next to. A dinghy or a freighter, take your pick. Guessing is all anybody can do with a drawing like that, and every person in the room guesses from a different memory.

Now I add one mark near the waterline, no bigger than a fish. The room changes its mind instantly. Nobody repeats the earlier guesses. Five hundred, somebody offers, and they are right to say it, because the little mark is now the ruler and the hull has to be read against it.

Neither guess was silly, by the way. Both men were reading the hull shape against boats they have actually stood next to, which is the only reference the drawing gave them. That is exactly the point. Without something in the frame to measure against, a viewer falls back on his own memory, and every viewer carries a different one. I work the same question from the other end in the workshop on surroundings.

Then I wipe that and put a far bigger hull behind the first one. The original boat becomes a tender. Make the thing behind it bigger again and the first boat is barely a speck. Not one chalk line inside the hull moved during any of that.

Look out of any window and you will find the rule running there as well, on every street in the world. Nothing stands in nothing, and no house on any street was ever left bare. Something always supports it. One morning during a class here the host's wife went out and planted flowers along the front of the house, and she was not thinking about design theory for a second. She wanted the house to look better, and the way she did it was by putting something small and deliberate beside something large.

Chinese painters have been working this for a thousand years. Go and look at shan shui landscape scrolls. Mountains fill the silk, and somewhere near the bottom there is a hut the size of a fingernail and a man smaller than that. Nobody writes the message down. The scale says it.

Size of the panel changes nothing about the rule. In that same house I mentioned, some of the framed pieces are barely bigger than a postcard and others run the height of a wall, and each still has to answer the same question. A carving 150 mm across (6 in) and a frieze 3 m long (10 ft) both need to tell a viewer what scale they are working at, and they both do it the same way, with what sits alongside.

Why can two leaves never be the same size?

Repetition flattens a panel. Once two elements match, a viewer stops reading them as separate things and starts reading wallpaper. So on a carved panel every flower is a different size from its neighbour, and the gaps between them differ as well.

Your own face follows the rule. One eye is slightly smaller than the other, on everybody, and nobody looking at you notices anything except that you look like a person. Jay Hambidge gave that principle a name a century ago and called it dynamic symmetry.

Watch what happens when the rule is broken. Crowd the quiet side of a panel with more flowers and the piece goes off, immediately and obviously, and nobody will be able to tell you why. My panels are busy work in basswood and I admit it freely. Busy in the right place is design. Busy everywhere is noise.

What surrounds it	How the main shape then reads	Where used	What goes wrong if ignored
Nothing at all	No size at all, a viewer just guesses	Almost nowhere	Every person reads it differently
One tiny mark	Suddenly enormous, the mark becomes a ruler	Seascape work	The mark itself steals attention
A bigger shape	Shrinks to a detail inside a larger story	Deep relief panels	Your main idea disappears entirely

Why three supporting elements is one too few

Sit through any decent sermon and you will hear one main idea with three points holding it up. That shape comes out of Greek rhetoric and it has been taught for two and a half thousand years, so there is nothing wrong with it.

A carved panel is not a speech, though, and the geometry gives a different answer. A rectangle hands you four golden crossings, not three, so four supporting ideas fit the frame the way three fit a sermon. Try it on your next drawing. Three elements around a hero leaves one crossing doing nothing, and the eye finds that gap and keeps returning to it, wondering what was supposed to be there.

Which part of a panel should dominate?

Pick one and commit. On the peony panel I use through this course the upper half rules, and that was a decision, not an accident. The lower half answers it and stays secondary, the way a smaller country backs a larger one.

We used to say in Russia that repetition is the mother of knowledge, and I repeat this one to every class because it is the rule people nod at and then ignore. One half rules. The other half serves. Call it dominion if you like, or a ruling party and an opposition, but do not let both halves try to lead.

Inside each half there is a second decision. Does it grow or does it fall? The main movement on that panel climbs, and climbing reads as alive. Look at the leaves and they rise too, all along the same line, which is what stops the upper half feeling like a heap of flowers.

The second movement does the opposite. It drops, and it drops along the other diagonal, so the two halves are arguing rather than agreeing. Both begin near the volute and part company immediately.

Both movements set off together, and the place they leave is the volute at the foot of the panel. A spiral scroll like that is the cheapest thing in the world to carve badly and one of the hardest to carve well, because it has to look like it is throwing the whole design upward while sitting perfectly still. The movement workshop takes that apart properly.

Opposite directions are the easy version. Two movements can also run the same way and still fight, the way two political parties can share a goal and disagree about everything else. I worked the two diagonals out in the second lesson, on top of the frame built in the first, and this is the same pair doing a different job.

Even one acanthus leaf on its own obeys this. A leaf is never a straight line. It rises or it drops, and inside that same leaf one lobe falls while another climbs.

Draw that same leaf the other way up and the whole thing inverts. The part that was supporting becomes the main idea, and the part that led is now the answer. Nothing changed except direction. That is how cheap the decision is at the drawing stage, and how expensive it is once you have taken 6 mm (a quarter inch) of waste off the wrong side of the board.

How many petals does a flower have?

Count them and you land on the same short list every time. Five, then eight, then thirteen, then twenty one. Euclid had already written the proportion behind it down as a line divided in extreme and mean ratio, centuries before anybody counted a petal. That list is the Fibonacci sequence, and it is built by the simplest rule in mathematics: add the last two numbers and write down the answer.

One and one make two. Two and one make three. Three and two make five, five and three make eight, eight and five make thirteen, and on it goes as long as you have chalk. Leonardo of Pisa worked it out watching rabbits multiply, which is a strange doorway into something this large.

Then open a sunflower and look at the seeds. They are not laid out in rows. Each seed sits in a diamond, and the diamonds run in two sets of spirals going opposite ways. Count the spirals running one way and then the other, and both totals come off that short list. Botanists call the arrangement phyllotaxis.

Here is the part that stops me every time. Measure across one spiral arm, then across its opposite, and divide one by the other. Whatever unit you use, the answer comes out at 1.61. Inside a seed head. At a scale of millimetres.

I carved a sunflower panel some years ago and spent longer on the seed head than on all the petals together, because getting those two spiral families to cross correctly is what makes a carved sunflower read as a sunflower. Carve the centre as concentric rings and you get a dartboard.

These numbers turn up far away from flowers. Spacing in the tabernacle, as the book of Exodus lays it out cubit by cubit. Letters of the Hebrew alphabet too, the modern square script, right down to the gaps between strokes. Take none of that on my word. My claim is smaller, that a man who has spent forty years measuring ornament starts noticing the same handful of proportions everywhere he looks, and that is either a very long coincidence or it is not one at all.

Closer to the middle the diamonds crowd together, and the pattern tightens exactly the way the numbers say it should. See the wisdom of the designer in that if you like. I do. Either way the wood does not care what you believe, it only cares whether you counted.

Knowledge and understanding are two different things, and this is where the difference shows. Plenty of people can recite that a sunflower follows Fibonacci. Far fewer can tell you what to do with a gouge because of it. I have met men with degrees who memorised a great deal and could not explain how any of it worked, and explaining how it works is the only reason I stand at that blackboard.

Go and look at whatever you carved last. Cover the main element with your thumb and ask whether the rest of the panel still tells you how big it was meant to be. If it does not, the space around it was never doing its job.

One last thing about the boat, because it is the cheapest test I know. Draw your design small, twice, on the same sheet. Put a tiny element beside the first one and nothing beside the second. Hold the sheet at arm's length and the two will not read as the same size, and they will not read as the same piece of work either. That takes four minutes and it has saved me from starting panels I would have hated by the third day.

Shall we carve?

The rest of this lesson takes all three rules onto real panels, and the workshops after it run them into the acanthus leaf workshop and then the law of rhythm in nature. Start at principles of design in wood carving for the whole path, or go straight at the Fibonacci workshop. Want a flower to try it on? The chamomile rosette is a good one, tuition runs monthly or yearly and renews automatically until you stop it, and you can always just pick a course and carve along.