Capture a favorite face in marquetry
Mar 06, 2014
By altering a photo of his daughter, using photo-editing software, Thibodeau was able to make a high-contrast version perfect for marquetry.
When I was shooting a recent article about how to build veneered furniture (coming up soon in FWW), at the San Diego shop of Craig Thibodeau, I noticed a small marquetry panel on his shelf, with the unmistakable likeness of his daughter on it.
Turns out he had discovered a simple way to convert a favorite photo of her into a scrollsaw pattern for marquetry. Using the Adobe Photoshop software on his computer, he scaled the image as needed and played around with the various effects and adjustments until the image had broken up into much simpler areas of black and white.
From there he simply stuck it onto a stack of dark and light veneers, and sawed out the basic outlines. The rest was typical stack-cutting marquetry technique: He picked out the pieces he wanted, taped them together to form the picture, and glued it onto a substrate.
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By altering a photo of his daughter, using photo-editing software, Thibodeau was able to make a high-contrast version perfect for marquetry.
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After stacking the two veneers he needed, and adhering the photocopy on top, Thibodeau used the scrollsaw to follow the lines, picked out the right pieces from the stack, and produced this marquetry image.
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The stack-cutting technique lets you cut lots of pieces all at once, in different veneers. Here are two other versions that came out of the same stack.
Comments
Well, I am in the pile again.
I would love to hear the specifics of what Photoshop filters/techniques were used to do this!
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