Audience
The six-week Carving Intensive is designed for aspiring professionals and committed amateurs, providing a rigorous, hands-on education in architectural and ornamental carving unavailable anywhere else in the country. This full-time course provides a practical foundation of skills in architectural and ornamental carving, the most in-demand types of work for professionals and challenging work for dedicated amateurs.
Curriculum
Students start with carving an assigned sequence of classic design motifs that build in complexity and are pertinent to both architectural elements and furniture. These typically include chip-carved and incised ornamentation and lettering, relief-carved scrolls, gothic tracery, moldings, floral/foliate motifs, and rosettes. Subsequently, students research and design their own projects, beginning with simple combinations of standard design elements and concluding with a more substantial project such as an arrangement of naturalistic foliage, fruit, or flowers.
This approach simultaneously develops hand skills, hones observational skills, deepens one’s understanding of how carvings “work” visually and aesthetically, and introduces the rich inheritance of period styles and techniques. Course topics include:
Design – how to prepare carvings by drawing on paper, modeling in clay, and transferring designs onto wood.
Tools – proper selection, correct sharpening, and effective handling of traditional carving tools such as single-bevel and double-bevel chisels, straight gouges, fishtails, skew chisels, V-tools, back-bents, spoon-bents, and long-bents.
Materials and finishing – understanding the differing visual qualities and working characteristics of wood species.
Hands-on techniques – lining in, roughing out, setting levels, establishing major planes, modeling the forms, grounding out, surface details and finishing cuts straight from the chisel, and undercutting.
History – styles and techniques of classic European carving that remain integral to high-end, decorative carving today.
Professional practices – virtual visits with accomplished carvers in the US and UK to learn how their businesses work.
Thanks to the small class size, each student is able to progress through the series of projects at their own pace.
Application Process
Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. No application is required.
All experience levels welcome.
Enrollment is limited to 8.
Faculty
Takako Jin is a traditionally-trained British master woodcarver who also teaches woodcarving at the prestigious City & Guilds of London Art School. From her South London studio, she fulfills carving commissions that extend from restoring and reproducing historic carvings to creating new designs.
After graduating in 2013 from the three-year City & Guilds carving program, Takako worked for many years at Carvers & Gilders Ltd., a Royal Warrant Holder and leading London workshop that specialized in 18th-century carved and gilded furniture. During her time there, Takako restored some of the finest examples of English antique furniture by renowned woodcarvers and designers from the past, such as Thomas Chippendale and William Kent. Through this work, she developed an expertise in traditional techniques and materials, and an intimate familiarity with historical English styles such as Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical.
In 2025, Takako received the Master Carver Certificate for Woodcarving, sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers and the City & Guilds of London Institute. The certificate is awarded in recognition of excellence in the practice of woodcarving and a commitment to the training of the next generation.
For more on Takako’s work, please visit takakojin.com.
Advisory Panel
The Advisory Panel to the Carving Intensive consists of leading American woodcarvers who specialize in decorative and architectural commissions. They generously support the course by sharing their extensive knowledge of professional practices, by advising on practical matters such as sourcing of tools and materials, and by offering apprenticeships to our graduates when possible.
Advisory Panel members are:
- Kevin Austin, Trenton, TX
- Patrick Burke, Manitowoc, WI
- Denny Collier, Bangor, PA
- Dave Green, Brooklyn, NY
- Sten Isak Havumaki, Biddeford, ME
- Erik Wyckoff, Minneapolis, MN
Tuition: $4,950
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