Design principles for wood carving 1

The golden ratio in a wood carving design is the split that puts your main idea at about 62 percent of a line, with 38 percent left on the other side. I call that place the golden spot. Your brain catches it as the most important spot on the canvas. In every design I have to find it, so the piece looks beautiful without explanation.

Even one simple flower changes when you move it. Carve it with all the right techniques, then shift it off the golden spot, and your brain is going to read it differently.

This lesson gives you two rules in the order I use them. Rule number one is the direction your design moves. Then comes the golden spot, and how to find it on a table apron.

The two rules on one card

• Settle the movement first. Will the design run right to left, or left to right?
• We write one way, a student from Israel writes the other, and that shows up in how we see a picture.
• Golden ratio, golden rectangle, golden section, golden cut. In class I call them the same thing, and the number is 1.62.
• Call a line 100 percent and the golden spot falls at about 62, with 38 left over.
• Move the halfway mark on a long apron until it sits near 60 percent.
• 60 percent goes before 40 percent. That order is your direction, so set it on purpose.

Why does direction come before the golden ratio?

People from different parts of the world think differently, and even the way we write is different. I say it plainly in this lesson. East versus West are absolutely different, even in how we look at things visually.

One student in the room was Israeli, and he writes right to left. We write left to right.

So I drew a couple of lines on the board, one slope each way, and put a bus on each one. Then I asked which way they go. If you're American, one bus goes downhill and the other goes uphill. It's just embedded in your brain. Someone from Israel reads them another way.

And sometimes I do have a real challenge with that. When a client comes from a different part of the world, I have to design for that mindset. The first thing I ask myself is whether the guy or girl is from the east or from the west, because that's how they're going to read the piece.

They don't know that. I know that. And there's the secret of how to present and sell a piece, how to say it's beautiful without saying it's beautiful, so their brain reads it as beautiful on its own.

I make the same call on a furniture panel. In Designing Furniture Panel 1 the movement of the view is settled before the golden ratio.

What if two people in one house read it two ways?

I had that once, with a couple. He was German and she was Chinese, and they were living in the United States.

Living here does not change the brain. Your German or Chinese roots stay inside your DNA, so the two of them would read that piece in different ways.

So I designed it a twisted way. One diagonal for him, another diagonal for her, and I mixed it all together. When I showed them the piece, they were so happy.

Then the builder installed it. I walked into the house and found the piece installed upside down. I did not say anything, because I didn't want to take the time to redo it. They still don't know. It's a true story.

Busy work still starts with the movement. The flower panel I show in this lesson moves both directions. But the starting point is still on one side, so the overall movement goes pretty much the English way, the American way, and then it turns back. Even in complicated stuff like that, I always start with the movement.

What is the golden ratio as a number?

A number you can carry around in your head at the bench, once you see where it comes from. It does have to do with mathematics. But there is an easy way in, and I explain it as a golden spot.

Math books give the number as about 1.618, and the golden ratio page on Wikipedia shows how it is worked out. Euclid described the same split more than two thousand years ago as dividing a line in extreme and mean ratio.

Here is how I give it to a class. The number comes from units. Call the square's side one unit, and it doesn't matter which unit: one inch, one millimeter, one meter, whatever you use. Then the full length is 1.62.

Now turn it into percent and call the whole line 100 percent. Counting along it, the golden spot falls at 62 percent of the line, or 61, and so on, which leaves 38 on the other side. Do the same thing going up and you land near 62 there too. Easy.

When you have those lines on a square, it's easy to hit them, and where they meet you get a golden spot. Hit more lines inside it and you get another golden rectangle. You build your design on golden rectangles inside of the golden rectangle.

Where does the armature come from?

Everything starts with a circle. That's the most simple form, so it goes on the board before anything else.

Then you make the square. Pretty much all design is based on those two forms. It's either square or circle.

Next come the lines. Put in the two diagonals, the Baroque diagonal and the Sinister diagonal, then a vertical line and a horizontal one. We call that armature. All the movements in a design go point to point along it, on the diagonals and on the straight horizontal and vertical lines. I explain the two diagonals on a larger scale later, and the Principles of Design in Wood Carving page lists every law in order.

You can go much deeper than this. I once taught a class at Marc Adams where we did all the design based on math, and everything was just calculation. You set a tool point to point, get your arc, and that's the end of your rectangle. I am not taking you to that depth here.

You really don't need to draw all those lines and circles every time. There's an easier approach.

How do you find the golden spot on a table apron?

Mark half, then move it to six tenths. Not everything on a piece of furniture is a golden rectangle. Say the piece is long, an apron on a table, and you don't want to repeat just one pattern along it. You want one golden spot.

Easy enough. Remember 100 percent, 40 percent, 60 percent. Six parts out of 10, and that's going to be a golden ratio, somewhere right there. To get it, take the length, find the middle, and shift that mark to the right or to the left. Which side depends on the brain structure, so it's the direction question again.

For a more exact mark you can use 62, because 62 sits nearer the golden ratio. But the 60 split is really easy to understand, and 60 percent of any space or any line lands on that spot.

Then do the same on the height. Find the same split there and get your line, and where the two cross is your golden spot. That is where you base your design, the main idea of that apron. Everything else goes round it.

Where you mark it	What I say about it in class	Where it helps most
62 and 38 percent	nearer the golden ratio, the exact choice	a square with its lines drawn in
60 and 40 percent	easy enough, 60 on one side, 40 on the other	an apron that is no golden rectangle
Middle, then shift	halfway first, then a shift right or left	any long space, side set by direction
Ten inches, then six	the middle is five, move it a little to six	the focal point on a tray

It doesn't matter what space you have to fill. You still have to find the main idea, the point you want to stress, who's going to be the main guy, if you wish, in the whole picture.

There is a whole course on carving a dining table apron. And for a board that is not in golden proportion at all, Designing Furniture Panel 3 finds the golden center with no calculation.

Which side of the board gets the 60?

The side your viewer reads first. Here my 60 percent comes first and my 40 percent second, and I did that intentionally. My direction, rule number one, runs from that side toward the point.

If I placed that point on the other side, your brain would read it absolutely differently. It would read from the other direction. So 60 percent goes before 40 percent, and that is how we settle it.

Do you need special calipers to find it?

They help, but you can work without them. On the Venice Room, workshop 89, I set the middle line of an acanthus movement by the golden ratio. If you have golden ratio calipers, it's much easier. They are three-leg calipers, and you can see one leg fall at about 60 percent of the distance, so 60/40.

And without even the calipers, I am able to get that line.

Calipers show it on your own body too. I tell the class to take those calipers to the knuckles of a finger, and the distance falls on a golden ratio. The elbow falls on it. The face is on a golden ratio as well.

I even use it on small details. On Acanthus over Moldings 9, a leaf slopes and rolls back about halfway, but it is not really a midpoint. Place a line and it falls on a golden ratio, 62 percent on one part and 38 on the other. You don't really have to go that far, but I think it's just wise to do that.

Is the golden ratio really in nature?

I say yes. It's actually based on nature, and everything in nature, everything in creation, is on a golden ratio. That's why I believe in the wisdom of the designer. I do call that designer the Creator, because it's impossible to design something without logic. Everything is based on the law.

The lesson video lays a spiral over a sunflower head. The Fibonacci sequence page on Wikipedia lists the florets of a sunflower among the patterns that follow those numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Divide each number by the one before it and the answer gets closer to 1.618.

I count with it on real work too. The question came up on The Tray of Blessing, lesson 8, of how many grapes to put in a bunch. In that case I had three. If I had the thickness, I would probably have put a couple right there, but I didn't, so it was Fibonacci. A lot of people have no idea about Fibonacci, I said, but it's going to make you happy, because you'll know.

What happens when you throw the rules away?

You get splashes. My children, they are all artistic. When my daughter was a child, I found a fine art teacher and paid a lot of money. I thought the way I always think: if you want to learn something, you find a master and you become an apprentice.

She lasted there maybe a couple of weeks. I asked her to show me what she did, and she showed me nothing, just a couple of splashes. What do they teach you, I asked. She said the teacher told her just to put something on a piece of paper and express yourself.

That's modern art, I told the class. In 2019 two copies of a banana taped to a wall sold for $120,000 each at Art Basel in Miami Beach.

Furniture went the same way. Nowadays everything in furniture is straight and plain. But nothing in nature is straight. Nothing. There's no such thing as a straight line in nature, and in Rhino even a straight line is called a curve.

In my point of view, getting rid of all those rules and laws is a rebellion against the creation itself. Go to museums and look at the beautiful pieces of art in history. Everything that survived there, I tell the class, is based on the golden ratio, and I name Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

The old schools knew it. Every school used to have a secret, and the secret was in design. Design is the most complicated thing, and design connects to your brain.

My daughter is an architect. She graduated in the top three people of her whole university. She still came to me for help with the design part and with the logic. They didn't even teach her the golden ratio, I told the class. Seventy thousand dollars a year, and that's it?

Does a client ever notice the golden ratio?

Most of them don't. I placed the main focal point on The Tray of Blessing the simple way. Say a piece is 10 inches (254 mm). The middle is five inches, and if you move it a little, that becomes your six inches (152 mm), just a simplification that pretty much becomes your golden ratio.

Is it really important for me? It is. For people, not really. Most clients don't even care about it. I don't explain to my clients why I did it that way, and I don't need to. As long as they like it, I'm okay with that. But I'm going to remember it all my life, and I know why I did what I did.

Shall we carve?

Next comes the golden spot itself in Design principles for wood carving 2, and the laws keep building in lesson 3 and lesson 4. Or pick a course and carve along with me. Tuition runs monthly or yearly, and it renews automatically until you stop it.