Principles of Design in Wood Carving

When I hit the golden spot, I know the piece is going to look beautiful without explanation. People look at it and don't know why. Design is the most complicated thing in this craft, and it connects to your brain.

A lot of universities teach only a small portion of the design process. I learned it a different way.

To learn something, you have to find a master and be his apprentice, and at sixteen I was the only apprentice of a fine-art master in Russia. For him, design was the laws of space, rhythm and repetition, and understanding the tools. He taught me to think like a tool.

Settle these before the wood

• Direction settles before anything else does. A panel has one overall movement, and the owner's mindset, Eastern or Western, decides which way it goes.
• Split off the long side rather than halving. Find the middle, then shift your mark off it.
• Any rectangle hides four strong spots. Your main flower claims one, and its opponent claims the spot across the far diagonal.
• Count the way nature counts. Three divisions inside a leaf, or five. Never four.
• Sizes never repeat on one panel. Shapes do. Shift the scale each time and your hand work gets depth.
• Straight is a mistake, and so is dead center. A leaf rib rides at sixty to forty, favoring your bigger space.
• Brand new to a gouge? Begin with first cuts for beginners and come back to this page after.

What follows is the skeleton of those laws, with the reason behind each one. That's the big question. Why?

What are the principles of design in wood carving?

Movement, the golden ratio, the two diagonals, hero and antagonist, space, dynamic symmetry, Fibonacci, arabesque, repetition and rhythm are the laws a good design stands on. Everything is based on the law. Every school used to guard its own version. The secret was in design.

Those secrets passed from master to apprentice, and almost nobody wrote any of it down. I found only a couple of books that even mention the baroque and sinister movement. And By Hand and Eye, from George Walker and Jim Tolpin, still does not show you the Fibonacci logic inside an acanthus leaf.

Meanwhile the art world went the other way. A banana taped to a wall sold for $120,000, and a later copy went for more. There's a story about a white canvas, and they say it's a cow. Where is the cow? Home. So where did the grass go? The cow already ate it, and now the cow is gone too. The Emperor's clothes.

Why does my carving look flat and dead?

I always start with the movement. Before you draw a single line, the whole piece has to be traveling somewhere, left to right or right to left, and every element in it has to agree with that decision.

People from different parts of the world read a picture differently. It shows even in the way they write.

I draw a bus on a slope at the chalkboard and ask the room which way it travels. If you're American, it goes downhill. One student in that class came from Israel, where they write right to left, and he reads it another way. We look different. It's just built into the brain.

So my first question on any commission is one I ask myself. East or west? That settles which way the whole piece moves, because that is how the client's head is going to read it. Once I designed a piece for a couple, a German husband and a Chinese wife, living here in the States. Two mindsets under one roof. I ran one diagonal for him and the other for her and braided them together. They loved it. Then the builder installed the thing upside down. I saw it the moment I walked in and never said a word, because I didn't want to take the time to redo it. They still do not know. Now you do.

What is the golden ratio in wood carving?

The golden ratio is 1.618, and at the bench it means one simple thing. Split any line six parts to four instead of down the middle, and the eye reads the long side first and calls the result beautiful without knowing why.

Golden ratio, golden rectangle, golden section, golden cut. Same animal wearing four names. The exact split runs 62 to 38, but six to four is near enough for wood and a lot easier to understand.

My daughter is an architect. She finished in the top three of her entire university, at $70,000 a year. They didn't even teach her the golden ratio. She came to me for help just with the design part, to understand the logic.

You need no math for this. Take the length you have to fill, say a table apron. Find the middle, then slide your mark toward one end until it sits at six parts of ten. Mark it there. Everything else you carve will be built around that mark.

Where do I put the main flower?

On one of four golden points. Every rectangle holds four, because each side you read from sets a different starting direction, and every direction produces its own golden cut.

Start at the bottom and go up, you get one point. Come down from the top instead and you land on a different one. Same again going side to side. Four points, and your brain hunts for all four whether you put anything there or not.

Draw your diagonals, verticals and horizontals over the rectangle first. We call that grid the armature, and every movement in an ornament runs point to point along it.

Pretty much all of it starts from two shapes. A circle and a square.

Now choose which of those points carries your big idea. On my flower panel the peony takes it. I made that call before touching the wood, and when you put golden ratio calipers on it, it falls right on 1.62.

Why does a good design need a bad guy?

With no fight there is no interest. There's one main guy, but he cannot exist on his own.

Every design has diagonals. Usually two main ones. One climbs to the right, and we call it baroque. The other falls the opposite way, and its name is sinister. Look up what sinister means and you will understand why I watch which line a thing sits on.

When you design something for your husband or your wife, look at them honestly first. Good person, build it on the baroque line. Not such a good person? Here you go, honey. Sinister.

Your hero sits on one diagonal and your antagonist sits on the other, and the antagonist is also powerful. The two remaining golden points turn into supporters, one behind each side, both smaller. In the movies the bad guy is usually Russian. Spies or mafia, and yeah, our hackers nowadays.

Role	Diagonal on my panel	Weight	What it does to the eye
The hero	Baroque, the line climbing right	The superpower	Takes the eye to the main point
The antagonist	Sinister, the line falling away	Also powerful	Starts the main fight, the main conflict
Two supporters	Whichever two golden points are left over	Much lesser	Back the big two and fight each other
Empty space	Often a golden point itself	Almost nothing	Tells a stranger how big the hero is

Nature runs the same fight. Pick up a spalted board and look at those black lines. Those lines are a war between fungi, and one of them has taken the most ground. He is the hero of that board. The rest crowd him, hold their borders and never cross over. While the fungus lives, those borders creep.

How much empty space should I leave around a carving?

Enough that the space itself tells a viewer how big the main thing is. Emptiness is a support too. Empty space also falls on the golden ratio.

Over at the board I draw a boat and want a number from the room. How long? First guess, 25 feet, call it 7.6 m. Next one comes back smaller, 16 feet or 4.9 m. But nobody can tell how big a boat is with no space around it. Then I put one small dot on the board, and the boat becomes huge. Now nobody's going to say 25. It's more like 500 feet, about 150 m. Put a bigger boat behind it instead, and the same boat turns small.

Chinese fine art works the same way. Mountains everywhere, one tiny house, one tiny man, because humans are just a tiny spot and nature is huge in the big picture.

Out of that comes a hard rule for your bench. Never repeat a size on one panel. Leaves, flowers, every one of them a different size. Even your own two eyes are different sizes, the left smaller and the right bigger, and that difference is called dynamic symmetry.

What is the Fibonacci sequence good for in carving?

Counting. Fibonacci sets how many petals a flower carries, how many leaves go into a design, and the divisions inside one leaf, because nature counts no other way.

Add the last two numbers to get the next. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and on it goes forever. Count the petals on any flower in your yard and the total lands on that list.

Now look inside a sunflower. The rows spiral both directions at once, and measuring one spiral against the other gives you 1.61 again. I carved a sunflower myself, and what sits inside one is the secret I tell my class.

Now bring the idea to an acanthus leaf. Three main divisions, or five, and never four or six. Inside each of those, three more. Where exactly the divisions fall depends on whose tradition you follow, because Italians put the split one way and the French push it closer to the center, and both answers stay inside the golden ratio.

Even the invisible border around that leaf obeys it. Say one line of that border runs 10 inches, 254 mm. Take the other line to the lower point and the two come out on the golden ratio. No book shows you that. Nobody explains that logic, so I told that class they were the first ones. You can sit in the same class and hear the rest of it.

Why can nothing in the design be straight?

Straight lines do not exist anywhere in nature, so a straight line in a carving looks weird, even when a viewer cannot say why. Everything curves, and everything ties back into everything else.

Carvers call that law the arabesque. Follow any line in a good ornament past the point where it disappears and eventually it swirls back and meets another one. If you continue a curve in your head and it wanders off into nowhere, that curve is wrong. Fix it.

Two working tools fall out of this. First comes the letter S. Put an S curve into a leaf and it carries the main movement further along without you drawing a stem at all. I can tell whether a leaf is growing upward or falling away from the S alone.

Second comes the letter T. Where one line runs into another like a T, the brain reads it differently. No T stops. Not in the lines you can see, and not in the ones that would cross somewhere out in the empty space if you kept drawing.

And the center line of a leaf is never actually in the center. It sits at sixty to forty, on the side that supports your bigger space. Shift it to the true middle and it looks weird.

How do I repeat a shape without it getting boring?

Repeat the shape and change the size. That is the whole law of rhythm.

A musician plays the same phrase again and leans harder or softer on it. We do it with scale instead. One long arc, a shorter one, then shorter again, and put the calipers on any two of them and they measure out close to 60 and 40.

Flowers work the same. Three flowers, three different sizes, and sometimes I drop in really tiny filler flowers to make the big one look bigger. Say one is 20 mm, three quarters of an inch. The next is smaller. Then I take that whole group and repeat it elsewhere on the piece, five flowers instead of eight, sizes shifted again. Depth comes from exactly that.

I've been in the most expensive houses in the world. I'm talking not just millionaires. Billionaires. I was doing the library for one man whose brand was on the shirt I wore the day before, and I also worked for the guy behind a shampoo you use daily. Every one of those houses is classical. Columns with 2,500 years behind them, Corinthian capitals, arches.

Modern design says less is more. In those houses there is no such thing. One client has the lion heads I carved on his doors, and inside his house you see what you don't see in museums, original work from the Renaissance era. The two statues beside his double doors are by Tilman Riemenschneider, a German carver of the 15th century. More is more.

So what do you actually do with all this?

Put a blank piece of wood in front of you and answer my questions in order before you draw. Direction first. Diagonal second. Third, whether the thing grows or falls, and which line rules. Then which of the four golden points takes your hero, where the antagonist stands, and last of all, who supports whom.

Answer those, and right away you have a picture in your head. After that you develop whatever you want, acanthus or anything else. You still have to watch the law of space, keep everything curved, and repeat each detail on a different scale.

That is the whole of the design class. Four lessons, thirteen videos, all filmed in front of a class, with students calling out their answers. In one class about four years before this one, at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, I taught design every day, and we did the whole design on math.

Music runs on the same laws, and the main point in a piece always falls on the 60 40 rule. If you don't believe me, just Google it. I made that mistake once. Years ago, when my daughter was young, she asked me something about the human body and I was only half listening, so I told her to Google it. Few years later she informed me that it was the biggest mistake on my part.

I will be honest with you about one more thing. These laws were put here by somebody, in my view, and building inside them means you are agreeing with how the world was actually made. Outside of the law, it's ego. Look at the pieces from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. They're still beautiful. Objects 2,000 years old still get repeated everywhere.

So there is a board in your shop waiting on a layout. Where does the hero go on it? Come and sit in the class, and by the end you will answer that one without me. Shall we carve?