Design principles for wood carving 3

Space in a carving design is whatever sits beside your main idea, since that decides how big the idea looks. When you look at the world, there is nothing like a house with nothing beside the house. Something supports the house. The space works just like that. It supports the main idea to make it stronger.

The day before I said this in class, the wife of one man in the room walked out and did some flowers. Why did she do that? She wanted the house to look beautiful.

You have seen this rule at work your whole life, even with no name for it. In this lesson I draw a boat on the chalkboard and ask the class how big it is, and two people give me two answers. After that I take the same rule back to a flower panel I designed, to the two diagonals and to the Fibonacci numbers, so you can see it in carved wood as well as in chalk.

Space, size and counting on one card

• A shape alone has no size, and nobody can tell how big my chalk boat is.
• A small dot beside it makes the boat huge.
• Put something much bigger behind it and that same boat turns small.
• Nothing next to the main flower should repeat its size.
• Keep the supporting part emptier, and put the busy part in the right spot.
• Petals and sunflower seeds follow the Fibonacci numbers, as I teach it.

How can one boat be two different sizes?

A boat drawn by itself can be any size at all. I draw just the outline on the board and I spell it for the class, B, O, A, T. Is it a boat, and does it look like a boat? My real question comes next. Can you tell me how big that boat is, without support, without space?

One person guessed 25 feet (about 7.6 m). A second opinion came back at 16 feet (about 4.9 m). I asked how they knew, and then I said it plainly, I'm sorry, wrong.

Once I put one small dot on the board, it becomes a huge boat. Nobody is going to say 25 anymore. At least it's like 500 feet (about 150 m) or something.

But on the other hand, I can put a bigger boat behind it and fill the space with a different idea. Then my boat turns into just a small boat. And if I had a big space and made that huge stuff even bigger, the first boat would be a really tiny little thing.

What is around the main idea makes a big difference. So the space is really important, and it hands you one of the questions you have to answer on every design. How are you going to show the size?

Where else do I draw that boat?

On the Venice Room I told the same boat story, in workshop 93. Those of you who took my lessons in person at the Marc Adams school know what I mean by that.

When I taught there, multiple times, I asked that question, and some people said it's a 12 foot boat (about 3.7 m). Others said 14 feet (about 4.3 m). But how do you know? Maybe it's bigger, maybe it's smaller, and you really don't know until you place another object right beside it.

In that video I called the boat object number one. You can't really tell its size. Place a small object, number two, right beside it and it becomes big, but if you put a bigger object beside it, the first one becomes small.

Why do Chinese painters make the house so tiny?

Chinese painters make the house tiny so you feel how big nature is. Have you seen Chinese fine art? They love mountains and trees. They draw a huge amount of mountains and nature everywhere, and then they put a tiny, tiny small house and a little guy. Humans are just a tiny spot, and nature is huge in the big picture. Even by putting that small dot there, they make the idea stronger.

In that Venice Room video I said I mean the antique work, not today's work. Huge mountains with lots of trees, a beautiful sunset or sunrise, and then just the small, small, tiny house somewhere right in the corner. They use that same law I use. These paintings are called shan shui, and the Wikipedia article on them notes that they usually center on mountains.

Does a small carving follow the same rule?

A small carving follows the same rule as a big one. The canvas, the space you have to fill, comes in all different sizes. Some pictures are really tiny and small. Sometimes I saw huge ones, and they still get the idea across somehow. Big or small, I still have to understand the space, what goes on the sides of the main idea, at my main golden point.

Working one tiny detail of the Venice Room panel, I said the rules are exactly the same as on the big details. This rule is about positioning certain sizes inside the space you want to feel.

Why should no two flowers be the same size?

Each piece next to the main flower needs its own size, and that is why no two should match. Look at my flower panel again. Everyone in that class knew the peony is the main guy in the picture. Now see what's next to that flower. Do you see the same size pieces? You don't.

You should not repeat the same size on one canvas. You shouldn't do the same size leaves or flowers. I told the class that even the eyes on the human body are different, the left one smaller and the right one bigger, and that it's called dynamic symmetry.

So you've got the main idea, and everything else has to be a different size. It also goes by the numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, which comes later in this lesson. But what surrounds makes a big difference.

Now you can see that flower is a big flower. Put a much bigger flower around it and it becomes a small flower. Two small flowers right there would look off completely. It wouldn't be organic.

Next comes the antagonist part, and it's absolutely different, it's empty. And the supporting part, our small country who supports the main guy, is even emptier. A bunch of flowers there would be off.

It's a busy design. I know that, and I say so. But you have to create that busyness in the right spot. You fill space based on the golden ratio, so ask yourself what the main idea is and how you want to support it.

Beside the boat	How the same chalk boat reads to the class	Where I said it
Nothing at all	Nobody knows its size, and my class guessed 25 feet, then 16 feet	This lesson, part two
A single dot	It turns into a huge boat, at least 500 feet or something	This lesson again
One bigger boat	The first one becomes just a small boat	Venice Room 93
Even bigger stuff	My boat turns into a really tiny little thing on the board	Lesson 3.2 too

How do tiny details make a big part feel bigger?

Tiny details placed inside a big part make it feel even bigger. In workshop 93 I took a big object and placed small objects inside it, to make it look huge. It's huge itself, but I can make it look and feel much bigger. That's why those small acanthus leaves are really tiny. They're going to work for me.

Later in that same workshop I carved a bunch of small lines, and I did it on purpose, because it was done before me by those artists. Create small details to make it feel like a huge area around it.

On the plate with butterflies, the idea is that the butterflies have to pop out from the design. To make that popping effect, you really have to surround them with smaller details. So in part four of that course I went everywhere I could find a spot and made really tiny movements, so all those spaces are filled with a lot of smaller details, and then the butterflies themselves.

Which part of the design should rule?

One part has to rule, upper or lower, and I decide which on purpose. Who's going to be the ruling party inside the country? On those flowers the upper part is dominant. I've done that design and I want it to dominate, dominion, empire, if you wish. The secondary part, the antagonist, is just secondary.

Inside those parts I make one more decision. Is it going to grow or is it going to fall? The main movement of those flowers goes uphill. It's growing, it's alive, it's not dying. The leaves grow up too, uphill, on the baroque diagonal.

The second movement falls, and it changes to the opposite diagonal, the sinister. Downhill it goes, starting from the same point, because this part supports that one.

They don't always have to go opposite. Two movements can run one direction and still fight each other. While we live on planet Earth, in design we still apply the same rules we see around us. Without a fight, there is no life.

I explain the two diagonals in the second lesson, on top of the golden spot from the first.

Even one acanthus leaf works like this. Draw the movement one way inside a rectangle, and the upper part is the main part, because the lower one supports it, and it gets much busier on the canvas. Same idea, just on a simpler design. Draw my acanthus the opposite way and that other part becomes the main idea of the leaf.

Why four supporting points instead of three?

Four points fit a design better because there are four golden spots. When you go to church and listen to the sermon, there's one main idea and three points around it to support it. I don't know why three. With the golden ratio it's supposed to be four, and four points would be much better than three.

Where do the Fibonacci numbers come in?

The Fibonacci numbers come in for sizes and for counting petals. The man behind the Fibonacci sequence found the rule by chance, as I told it, just looking at nature and the jumping rabbits and how they multiply. His 1202 book was Liber Abaci, and the Wikipedia page on it says one of its problems is a growing population of rabbits.

Everything starts with 1. One plus one is two, and two plus one is three. Then you take only the last two numbers: 3 plus 2 is 5, 3 plus 5 is 8, 8 plus 5 is 13, 13 plus 8 is 21, and on and on and on.

Take a flower and count how many petals it has. I told the class it's always going to be on the Fibonacci sequence, five petals, eight, 13, or thousands.

Some of you saw the sunflower I carved. Look inside a sunflower, past the petals. What's inside? Seeds. Each seed sits in a diamond shape, and the movements go in one direction and in the other, repeating each other. The closer to the center you get, the busier it gets.

Wikipedia's article on phyllotaxis, the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, calls the sunflower head the most famous example.

Take one line from that point and look at the opposite line, which is more like a swirl going around. Say the first line is 10 inches (25 cm). Calculate the other, and as I said in class, it comes out at the golden ratio number, 1.61, even inside those tiny little seeds. See the wisdom of God when He created that, and I said wow is the best word for it.

My own teacher was really big on design. All the mathematics, golden ratio and Fibonacci numbers, all the movements and armature, space and rhythm. I said that in a 2020 livestream, and I added that in person it takes me the whole week to explain the whole process.

Why does understanding matter more than memory?

Repetition is a mother of knowledge. That's how we used to say it in Russia, and that's why I repeat these rules in class.

But knowledge without understanding doesn't make any sense either. There are a lot of guys in universities, and all they do is learn some stuff without understanding. They try to memorize it, but they don't understand how stuff works. My goal that day was to explain to the class how stuff works.

Do you have a carving with one main flower? Is anything next to it the same size as its neighbor, leaf for leaf? Then that's where this lesson starts.

The full lesson has all three parts on video, and the next lesson goes on to the law of rhythm. Start at principles of design in wood carving for the whole path. Tuition runs monthly or yearly and renews automatically until you stop it, and you can always just pick a course and carve along.

Shall we carve?