Each piece of work begins with a sketch or line drawing. Marquetry can also begin with a photograph. Often with wildlife I will first grab a photo as the opportunity presents itself, and then I will produce my drawing from that.

Once I am satisfied with the drawing I produce a tracing on clear acetate. Here I concentrate on what will be the divisions between different pieces of wood. Once this tracing is completed it is flipped over so that I am looking at a mirror image of my original drawing. This step often confuses people. My reason is that I work on each deign from the back. This is done because as the small pieces of wood are first assembled (prior to gluing) they are temporarily held together with veneer tape. The tape is put on the face of the design so that it can be scraped off after gluing. Since it is on the face I cannot see the face and I am forced to work on the veneer from the back.

Using carbon paper I transfer the mirror image onto a piece of veneer, perhaps the piece that I have chosen for the background.

Now the cutting begins. This is an area where there are a wide variety of techniques. For now I will talk about bevel cutting with a scroll saw. I use jewellers saw blades that are so fine they resemble a strand of hair. To see the teeth clearly I must look through a magnifying glass. Using these blades I will cut through the piece that will be discarded and the piece that will replace it at the same time by stacking them on top of each other. To avoid leaving a gap the width of the saw blade, the saws table is placed on an angle. This angle can vary depending on the thickness of the veneers and the thickness of the blades. For most of my cutting I have found an angle of eight degrees works well. This bevelled cutting produces bevelled edges on the two pieces of veneer with the top piece fitting snugly into the bottom hole without any gap. Picture the way that a pie fits into a pie plate.

Once fit together this assembly is flipped over and taped together on the face.

In basic terms this process is repeated hundreds, or thousands of times until the composition is complete. This photo shows black and white pieces of wood, but it also shows a shadow effect between the feathers that is created by dipping each piece of wood into hot sand.

Once the piecing is completed the assembly is glued onto a back board, making sure that the tape side is up and not sandwiched between the veneer and the back board. I have two presses. A screw press that was built in the 1940’s, and a new vacuum press.

After gluing the tape is removed, the picture is sanded, framed or integrated into furniture, and then finished. Nothing to it!!!