First Fan Carving

Study the furniture built prior to the Queen Anne period and you’ll find surface ornamentation is primarily accomplished with mouldings and/or paint. While there are a few examples of carvings on earlier work, it wasn’t until the first third of the 18th century that furniture makers included decorative features on their work such as shells and fans.

No difference. As with any woodworking project, the path to a great carved fan begins with good, accurate layout work.

Wallace Nutting, in “Furniture Treasury Vol. III” (Macmillan Publishing Co.), separates shells from fans by calling them, “those cheaper modifications which more properly are denominated fans.” From a carving perspective, he was correct – shells are more difficult to produce. But from a purely aesthetic point of view, I think fans, when carved well, rival any shell design in beauty.

As the popularity of fan carvings grew during the 1700s, each region of furniture manufacture developed its own style. Today, we evaluate the carved fan to help identify in which region a piece of furniture was built.

This design was developed from a number of New England pieces, and I have infused my own ideas as well.

Excavation guide. The key to cutting the serpentine shape both level and consistent is to drill accurate holes and work to their depth.

As an introduction to fan carving, you might expect a flat design. However, creating an undulating design, a serpentine or an S-shaped surface, involves  only a couple additional steps during the carving process. And the results are worth the extra effort.

Accurate Layout, Better Results
I imagine there are woodworkers who carve exceptionally well who could position themselves in front of a blank of wood and freehand carve a masterpiece fan. I cannot.

The first step in fan layout is placement. This fan is carved into a drawer front. The carving is placed 1 1/4″ above the bottom edge of the drawer front to gain additional shadow lines as the design rolls into the drawer divider below. Mark this distance up from the bottom edge, then use a straightedge and pencil to draw the baseline.
   
Most fans on period furniture are symmetrical designs. Mark the middle of the drawer front on the previously marked baseline. Use a square to extend a vertical line up the face of the front. The intersection of the two lines is important; a circle and a half circle are drawn from this point. The circle, from which the rays travel outward to the fan’s edge, has a 1 1/2″ diameter, which is a 3/4″ radius. Use a compass to complete the full circle.

Work between the lines. The addition of the inside layout line, along with the depth-setting holes, allows you to create a level and symmetrical trough.

The size of the circle influences the width of the rays at their smallest or narrowest section. If the circle shrinks in size, the width of the rays at the circle becomes too narrow to carve or distinguish. Your first instinct might be to increase the size of the inner circle, but I must caution you that you need to keep the ratio of the circle and the fan size in mind. Proportions are easy to lose if you’re not careful, and then the carving won’t look pleasing to the eye.

The radius of the outer edge of the fan, the half circle, is determined by the height of the drawer front. If you have no boundaries the sky’s the limit as to size, but for this drawer front, set the compass so the top edge of the fan is 1″ below the top edge. That’s a radius of 5 1/8″ and the fan is 10 1/4″ across at the baseline. Draw the outer edge of the fan with a compass, then continue the layout lines from the end of the half circle (where the half circle intersects the baseline) to the bottom edge of the drawer front using a square.

Step Off the Rays
With the overall dimensions of the fan set, the next step is to lay out the individual rays. This task is completed with a pair of dividers, a pencil and a straightedge.

Set the dividers at 1″ (this is the figure I used) and begin to step off the points at the intersection of the vertical line and the fan’s outer edge. Working from the centerline out maintains the symmetry of the fan. Make very light pinpoints as you lay out one side of the fan  by making impressions along the fan’s outer edge. The last point, the one made nearest the fan’s baseline, should be very close to that baseline. If your layout falls short, increase the spread of the dividers then repeat this step again.

It’s OK to be slightly past the baseline, but if you go too far past you begin to close the fan’s circumference and, in my opinion, that changes the look. Small deviations are fine and you should always please your eye.

Which direction do you carve? The cutting action of a gouge near the middle rays is mostly cross grain, but as you move to the outer rays you have to read the grain.

Once the dividers are set and the width of the rays is determined, step off the points adding pressure as you work. Move to the second half of the fan and repeat the steps to lay out the ray points, again starting from the centerline.

Now connect the points made with the dividers with the point at the intersection of the vertical line and the fan’s baseline. Carry the lines past the fan’s edge. You’ll need to draw those lines in a second time after dishing out the serpentine area.