Design principles for wood carving 1

The golden ratio is the split that puts the main idea of a design at about 62 percent of a line instead of the middle. You mark that spot first and grow everything else around it. Before you mark it you settle which way the design travels, because 60 percent read first and 40 percent read second is what tells the eye where to go.

You draw an ornament. It looks wrong and you cannot say why. The leaves are even, the scrolls match, nothing is out of place, and the thing still sits there dead on the paper. I watched that happen on my own bench for years before anybody told me the reason, and when somebody finally did, it took about four minutes.

Two rules carry most of it, and this lesson is both. First the direction a design moves. Then the one spot inside the board where the main idea belongs. Miss those and no amount of clean carving saves the panel.

What decides whether a design reads right

• Direction comes first. A Western eye travels left to right, an Eastern eye travels right to left.
• The main idea belongs around six tenths along, not at the halfway mark.
• 1.62 is the only number you have to remember. Golden ratio, golden rectangle, golden section and golden cut all name the same thing.
• On a shape that is nowhere near a golden rectangle, six tenths lands close enough to carve.
• Find the middle, then shift it. Fastest road to the spot on a long apron.
• Put 60 before 40 and you have chosen the direction on purpose instead of by accident.

Why does a design look wrong when nothing is wrong with it?

Your brain is reading a spot you never marked. A viewer does not measure anything. He looks, and some part of him decides in under a second whether the thing is worth more looking, and that decision is made at one place on the board. Land your main flower there and the panel holds together without a word of explanation. Move it 50 mm (2 in) and the same flower goes flat. I open the golden ratio introduction with this, because nobody ever taught it to me either, and I had been carving for a good many years by then.

I am not talking about taste here. The old schools kept this as a trade secret, and the secret was never how to hold a gouge. The secret was in the design.

My daughter is an architect. She finished near the top of her class at a school that costs about $70,000 a year, and she came home and asked me for help with the design logic, because nobody there had ever mentioned the golden ratio to her. Not once in the whole degree. Seventy thousand dollars a year bought her everything except that.

Which way should the design travel?

Before anything else, ask which part of the world your reader comes from. This sounds like a strange question to put before any carving, and it is the first one I ask on a commission. People raised on English or Russian start at the left and work across. Hebrew and Arabic run the other way, right to left. That habit does not stay on the page, it moves into the eyes, and it decides where a person starts looking at your panel.

Try it on yourself. I draw two lines on the board and a little bus on each one. If you grew up in America, one bus is climbing and the other is rolling down, and you knew which was which before I finished asking. Show the same two buses to a man from Israel and he reads them the other way round. Neither of you is wrong. The wiring is different, and you did not choose it.

So when I sit down to design, the first thing I settle is not the leaf. It is the travel. In the first part of this lesson I work that through on the board with nothing but chalk, and once the direction is fixed, every scroll and every acanthus after it has somewhere to go.

One commission taught me this the hard way. The husband was German and the wife was Chinese, both living in the United States for years, and the two of them read a panel in opposite directions. You do not undo that by moving house. So I designed it twisted, one diagonal running his way and one running hers, mixed together, and they were delighted with it.

Then the builder hung it upside down. I walked into the house, saw it, and said nothing, because taking it back and redoing the install would have cost days. They still do not know. The panel works either way, so I let it lie.

A big piece can run both ways at once. The floral panel I hold up in this lesson had to serve five boats, so the movement turns back on itself in the middle. The starting point is still on one side, and the overall travel still goes the American way. Complicated work does not escape the rule. It just hides it better, which is exactly why I start every one of those with the movement.

What exactly is the golden spot?

A circle and a square give you everything. Those two shapes are where design starts, and I mean that plainly, because almost every ornament you admire in a museum sits on a frame built from them.

Draw the circle. Bring the square up around it.

Then run the diagonals, corner to corner, and add a vertical and a horizontal through the centre. What you have now is called the armature, and every movement in the design travels point to point along it. The word sounds grand. The thing is six lines of chalk.

The two diagonals have names, and the names are worth knowing before you use them. The one climbing from the lower left is the baroque diagonal. Its opposite, falling from the upper left, is called sinister. They carry different weight, and a leaf laid along one of them does not feel like the same leaf laid along the other. I take that apart on a larger scale in the last part of this lesson.

Where those lines meet, you get spots. Some of them are ordinary crossings. One of them is the golden spot, and that is the one your main idea wants. Finding the golden spot gets a whole workshop of its own later in the course, because there is more to say about it than fits here.

Where does the number 1.62 come from?

Units, and nothing harder than that. Call the short piece one unit, whatever unit suits you. Inches, millimetres, metres, the arithmetic does not care. The long piece is then 1.62 of it, and there is no more arithmetic than that. Euclid wrote this down as a line divided in extreme and mean ratio more than two thousand years ago, and carvers have been leaning on it ever since.

Read it as a percentage and it gets easier to carry in your head. Take any line and call the whole thing 100 percent. Counting from one end, the golden cut lands at 62 percent, which leaves 38 percent on the other side. Do the same measurement going up and you get a second line at 62 percent, and where the two meet is your spot. The box that falls out of it is a golden rectangle, and inside it sits another one, and you can keep going as deep as the design needs.

Where you split	What the eye does with that split	Best for	Where it lets you down
Dead middle, 50	Eye parks there and the panel goes quiet	Almost never	Any panel with a main idea
Golden spot, 62	Eye lands and then moves on	Most carving	Boards far from a golden rectangle
Plain 60, 40	Close enough that nobody misreads your panel	Long aprons	Small work where 62 shows

How do you find the spot on a table apron?

Six parts out of ten. Furniture does not hand you golden rectangles. An apron under a dining table might be 1500 mm long and 150 mm tall (about 60 in by 6 in), which is nothing like 1.62 to 1, and you still need one place for the main idea to sit.

Forget 62 and 38 on a board like that. Use 60 and 40. On a 1500 mm (60 in) rail the two marks land about 30 mm apart, a little over an inch, and nobody standing in a dining room is going to audit which one you picked. The main idea still reads as the main idea.

Here is the fastest way I know. Measure the length. Find the true middle. Now shift that line to the right or to the left until it sits at about six tenths, and which way you shift it is the direction question from the beginning of this lesson, answered with a ruler. That shift is the whole trick.

Whatever space you are handed, the job does not change. You still have to decide what the main idea is, who the main guy in the picture is going to be, and everything else arranges itself around him.

The shorter side is not leftover. It carries the answer to the main idea, and the tension between the long side and the short one is most of what makes the apron worth looking at. Want to watch this go onto real furniture? The dining table apron course walks that job start to finish.

Is the golden ratio really everywhere in nature?

Look at a sunflower and count. The seed heads pack in two sets of spirals. Count them and you land on neighbours in the Fibonacci sequence, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. Divide each one by the one before it and the answer creeps toward 1.618.

The same packing shows up in a daisy, in a pinecone, in the scales of a pineapple. Leonardo went after the human body with the same idea in the Vitruvian Man, and Jay Hambidge built a whole teaching method on it that he called dynamic symmetry. We take that up properly in dynamic symmetry and the acanthus leaf.

Your own hand carries it. Measure one finger segment, knuckle to first joint, then the segment above it. The two lengths sit near the same ratio. Elbow to wrist against wrist to fingertip does the same thing. Buy a pair of golden ratio calipers one day and you will spend a week measuring everything in the house, which is how most of us learn it.

I will tell you where I stand, and you are free to disagree with me. I call it the wisdom of the Creator, because you cannot design anything without logic behind it, and the logic was here long before I picked up a gouge. Go and look at what survived in the museums. The Baroque altars, the furniture, the work of Grinling Gibbons. The pieces that lasted three hundred years are the pieces built on the law.

What happens if you throw the rules away?

You get a banana. I took my daughter to a fine art teacher when she was small, paid good money for it, and asked her after two weeks what she had learned. She showed me a couple of splashes on paper. The teacher had told her to express herself, and that was the whole lesson.

That road ends at a banana taped to a wall selling for $120,000 at an art fair in Miami. Somebody bought it. Then a second edition sold as well.

Look at the furniture being built right now. Straight, plain, flat. There is no straight line anywhere in nature, not one, and even in Rhino every straight line is stored as a curve. Getting rid of the law does not free you. It only leaves you with nothing to steer by, and your hand knows it even when your mouth cannot explain it.

Four years ago I taught a class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking where we built every design on pure math, calculated end to end, arcs struck with dividers. You do not need that to carve well. Knowing the spot is there will do, and a pair of proportional calipers laid over a panel of basswood finds it in about ten seconds.

Go back to something you carved last year and find its 62 percent. My guess is that the part you like best is already sitting close to it, and you put it there without knowing why. That is your eye working ahead of your head, which is a fine thing to have, and a poor thing to rely on when a client is paying.

Shall we carve?

The rest of this lesson runs the two rules together on the board, and the workshops after it take the golden spot into a Roman acanthus leaf and into full panels. For the whole path from the first chalk line, start at principles of design in wood carving, or pick a course and carve along with me. Tuition runs monthly or yearly, and it renews automatically until you stop it. You can read more about how I learned all this if you want the long version.