Step by step
In September 2024, Craeft technology experts from Mines Paris – PSL specialising in gesture capture, and anthropologists from the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (CNAM) met at CETEM (Technology Centre of Furniture and Wood), located in a historic furniture cluster in the south-east of Spain, in the city of Yecla.
Within the framework of the Craeft Ethnographic Protocol, they recorded and captured gestures and movements from the process of woodcarving. The Ethnographic Protocol aims to support the development of digital learning tools designed to facilitate the transmission of traditional woodcarving skills for future generations, but also to provide an innovative approach to teaching and documenting the process.
As explained in the Methodology section, in the Ethnographic Protocol, craft practitioners play a central role in conveying insights into craft practice, workspaces, processes, materials, and traditional narratives. For this reason, the recording session began with meeting and getting to know one of the last woodcarving artisans, Francisco Sánchez Carcelén.
The video shows the insights from the gesture recording session that took place at the Technology Centre of Furniture and Wood (CETEM), Yecla, Spain.
Credits: CETEM (2024). From left to right: Francisco Sánchez, woodcarver, Inés Moreno, an anthropologist affiliated with Cnam, Juan Carlos Bañón, technician at CETEM, Arnaud Dubois, an anthropologist affiliated with Cnam, and Juan José Ortega, project manager at CETEM.
Francisco began practising woodcarving at a very young age, when he was 11 years old, working in workshops alongside renowned artisans such as Pedro Ortega. He has dedicated his entire life to woodcarving, which is his passion, and has contributed to the creation of several significant handcrafted woodcarving artworks, both pieces of furniture and religious art, used in the traditional Spanish Holy Week processions.
The Craeft team jointly with Francisco decided to focus on recording the manufacturing process of an object that entails the most usual elements of a woodcarving artwork: a spiral, an acanthus leaf, a convex-fluting leaf, a sphere and a volute.
Thus, the making of this carved piece incorporates the essential gestures, movements and use of tools that every woodcarver should master.
Credits: Inés Moreno, Cnam (2024). Woodcarver object developed during the recording process.
Following the selection of the making process, the recording session started. This session included recordings from both first-person (egocentric view) and third-person (exocentric view) perspectives. The first-person perspective was recorded by a wearable head camera, while the third-person perspective was captured using fixed cameras displaced throughout the workshop, allowing for a variety of angles to be captured.
Credits: Gavriela Senteri, ARMINES (2024). Third-person perspective of Francisco Sánchez during the woodcarving process.
Credits: Gavriela Senteri, ARMINES (2024). First-person perspective of Francisco Sánchez during the woodcarving process.
The process
The following sequences show a more detailed step-by-step of the woodcarving process:
Drawing involves creating and outlining a preliminary design directly onto the wood using a pencil or some chalk. This process needs to be repeated multiple times, since while the wood is being worked on, the initial drawing gets erased.
Roughing out implies removing excess material. Cuts are made using a large gouge or a chisel, most often at oblique angles, the strike force adjusted to the required cut width.
Marking means working on the details and defining the shapes. In most cases, these are cuts made with the gouge held in a more vertical position, tapped by a mallet. These cuts generally do not remove much material.
In addition to recording Francisco Sánchez during the process of creating a wood-carved piece, the sharpening of the tools, a crucial step in woodcarving, was also documented.